The Self-Obsession Network
Sean Moore
Why yes, I’d like to read a live-blog of your life.
Why do you post something on Facebook? Is it to proclaim to the world that you accomplished something? Do you just enjoy throwing the intimate details of your life into the winds, unconcerned with their final destination? Perhaps you like to chronicle every banality in your life for later reflection?
Or, and let’s be honest, this isn’t really up for debate: maybe you’re just an asshole that likes to brag.
What a wonderful thing that Facebook already includes metrics to measure just how awesome you are. Three shares, 15 likes, and ten comments? You must be a social media mastermind. Tell me, do you sit there, after you posted your particularly clever thought, waiting for the rest of the world to recognize your genius?
Do you get upset when the world doesn’t recognize your genius? No you’re right, it’s not you – maybe your joke went right over the heads of your friends. You can’t be blamed for your less-sophisticated friendships, after all. Or maybe someone else beat you to posting that link to that Tumblr page of that GIF of that one funny actor and a comment on someone’s weekend adventure.
Or maybe you’re just not that interesting. Maybe, just like you, all of your “friends” just blindly accept their spammed friend requests, and they couldn’t even pick your face out of a lineup (and you, silly you, have done an extreme disservice to every potential creeper, making your profile picture one of you and your twenty ‘besties’). Or what you have to say just isn’t interesting, isn’t funny, just blends in to the rest of the drivel in everyone’s newsfeed.
Sorry about that.
Or maybe instead your friends aren’t even on Facebook, eagerly awaiting your next golden nugget. Their out living their lives. You know, the ones that don’t involve sticking your nose into a glowing rectangle.
No one logs onto Facebook to congratulate a friend in overcoming some incredible journey. That’s not something a status comment, an email, a tweet, a like, anything social can capture. The important things in our life still require that physicality of human interaction, rather than the performance our digital social lives now are.
So instead, they visit to proclaim some unessential fact. They visit to hear what someone is saying about the clever little dick joke they posted. They visit to be heard. They visit to be reminded that they haven’t been forgotten.
It’s not the right kind of social. We – and I mean that in the most intimate sense of you and me – doesn’t depend on constant validation. We depends on hard work. We depends on trust. And most importantly, we depends on love.
Facebook, Twitter, and whatever else exists currently competes for our attention span. They certainly compete for our eyeballs. They may even grab ahold of that little voice at the back of our head.
But they don’t lay claim to our hearts.