Strange, Troubling Times: facebook as Big Brother

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” –George Orwell

“The lions and the lambs ain’t sleeping yet.” –Arcade Fire, ‘The Well and the Lighthouse

In his magnum opus, 1984, George Orwell created a dystopia where the Ministry of Love (headed by Big Brother) observed everything that the proles (working class) of Eurasia and Eastasia did, said and thought.

I remember the first time I heard someone say that we should be careful what we put online. It was my favorite college professor. At the time, I only had a livejournal. I’d always been careful not to post anything that I felt may be incriminating. She talked about how potential employers could see what we were doing, as could the police. Now, I don’t believe she is some latter day Nostradamus, just someone with common sense who could see where the internet was taking us.

Then, we were our own worst enemies.

Recently, I received an e-mail from my friend Craig about a New England Patriots cheerleader who was cut from the team because facebook pictures of her drawing (Swastikas and unbecoming words) on a passed out friend leaked online. Most of us would argue that this was tame and she didn’t deserve to be let go. However, what we think doesn’t really hold any weight, what matters (right or wrong) is what her employer thought about the photos.

If you read my previous facebook essay, you know that I wrote about the lack of “real” connections being made through social networking. I stated that facebook’s most appealing feature was the ability to watch other people fail, and that any media that is predicated upon such a thin, vile premise must either adapt or cease to exist. Today, I’ve found more uses for facebook, but I still strongly believe that the connections we form via social networking are often too whimsical (I used to know this person, kind of) and too meaningless (you knew my brother, not me) to positively impact our lives. But more importantly, the real problem with social networking is that we don’t critically think about its’ myriad pro’s and con’s, and it is my contention that most don’t even think about the media they consume and partake in, and its effects.

facebook is dangerous for the same reason that it is compelling, it gives countless people unprecedented access into the lives of others. It’s like porn for voyeurs. And it is almost impossible for many of us to resist partaking in. But why?

I’ve dubbed this generation the Share Me Generation. Today, everything is about Me. (Not to say that there is no virtue in thinking of oneself, there is. However, I don’t see virtue in the way that Generation Share Me broadcasts itself; most have no panache or common sense.) I won’t argue that social networking (and blogging) is the biggest factor in the genesis of Share Me, but it has to make the list. People my age (and younger) seem to believe that their opinions, ideas and drunken pictures of debauchery belong in a public domain, in totality, sans filter. (1)

This is wrong in the same way that it is wrong for the Share Me Generation checkout girl at Pick ‘n Save to tell me she is having a long day. In both cases, I’m not supposed to know these things, and frankly, it is unnatural for me to. Though, today, openness is oft rewarded, socially at least. We look up to people who appear frank, both in person and over the interweb. Frankness is only a virtue when people know how to filter themselves, and in the case of Generation Share Me, there is a significant deficiency in the area of filters.

Unfortunately for us, Orwell’s sage advice went unheeded. Now we are all enemies of each other, though we don’t realize it: Our weapons of choice, the camera, the camcorder and the computer.

Not only are we not part of the revolution (that Winston Smith probably hoped for in 1984), we are actively perpetrating the function of Big Brother upon each other with our camera lenses and our mouses (mice?). Of course, some will say, just untag the pictures, and yes, that may work, for now, but with no idea where these pictures (and other virtual media) will end up or whose (virtual) hands they are in now, it may be a little more wise to see that photos are outright deleted, etiquette be damned.

In Orwell’s vision, it was high-ranking government officials who were performing surveillance upon the subservient proles. The reality today is even scarier than the picture that Orwell painted; we are performing that surveillance on each other, for free, (and most troubling) without even thinking about it.

I believe if we really thought about it and came to a consensus, our desire is that facebook be our virtual representative, our showplace, to friends and acquaintances. Yet, we also desire a certain level of privacy that is unheard of in the virtual realm. The swath of humanity that has access to facebook makes it ineffective at achieving both ends of the dual purpose that we want it to serve. facebook is both great and scary because it negates one thing that the internet has always been good at offering, anonymity. In other words, its exciting because it flies in the face of convention.

This essay is not a call to action, per say, but a hope that the people that read this, my facebook “friends”, at least begin thinking about and discussing the many possible implications and outcomes of social networking. Are we being more intelligent than the generation before us? Are our actions symptomatic of the advent of social networking (being that whichever generation first received this technology would employ it in a similar manner that we do (2))?

I propose that the answer is a resounding no. This is a much bigger topic than I intend to take on here, but it is many of our parents (mostly like the generation after our parents, though many of our parents were early adopters of this mindset) who have propagated this belief that the life of the child is so important. (Some examples: how safe playgrounds are now, attending every little league game and not keep score, not having friends of their own, et. al.) It is all about feelings these days, and we have been made to feel like we are worthy of spotlight, we court its rays with the most powerful media available. Not thinking critically or independently about the consequences of this desire.

I’d like to see our generation start to treat their facebook pages a little more like resumes and a little less like personal party chronicles. Maybe that is lofty and unreasonable, and maybe it’s society that is rebelling against us instead of the other way around. Yet, we are setting the precedent for what social networking will be in the future by our actions today. Let’s stop extending a helping hand to forces that work against our best interests and start helping each other by making wise choices in regard to how we employ all of the technology we use and media we consume.

Then, once again, we’ll be able to write things on our passed out friends with Sharpie markers without Big Brother’s jarring glare in our periphery.

1 Often, these photos come in what I’ve taken to calling Photo-Dumps. Sorry if that is a little too vivid, but I think that the allusion is warranted. In both cases, you are releasing waste. I’ll never understand why people post full albums from one party on facebook. Often times you’ll see the same picture two or three times in a row and wonder why that person decided to take a photo-dump instead of just picking out the best one. Again, I don’t profess to understand.

2 In other words, would people in the 1950’s or 60’s act in the same manner that we do if they were given this technology?

Populist Rhetorical Fan Quantification (Or How do I Qualify Myself as a FAN?): Now with footnotes!

I was at the Brewers game on Sunday. The game where 40,000+ fans gathered to bang together prophylactic-resembling balloons, called Thundersticks (1), at inopportune times. The game where Jeff Suppan gave up 3 home runs while the Brewers made the passable Joe Blanton look like an All-Star, Cy Young candidate. The game where hapless manager Dale Sveum pinch-hit CC Sabathia because he hit 2 home runs this year and likes batting (2). The game where I suggested to my brother that Corey Hart should change his first name to ‘No.’ The game where the Brewers season ended.

The fact of the matter is none of it should have mattered to me. I was told during the game, via text message, that I am not a ‘real fan (3).’ Granted, the person who accused me of the treachery is prone to grandiose overstatements and that the criteria for this proclamation seemingly reflected only my attendance this season (4 games). Regardless, the comment gave me pause during the shellacking; I began to think about what it means to be a fan (4).

Everyone has a different idea about what fandom is and what it means. For example, when someone says that they are a big fan, I always assume this means that they watch the games and hope that their team wins. I also assume that they know the players’ names, their position, their number and perhaps a number of facts and speculation about the player (i.e. said player is a sex offender (Reuben Patterson), has a nagging injury (Charles Woodson), or has a bunch of kids (Hart)). These things seem important. Still, there is no reliable scientific way to quantify fandom.

But it isn’t as arbitrary as it may seem. I am not certain my Mom cares about the Brewers and Packers winning. I watched the Brewers game with her last week at my step dad’s bar (she spent 10 minutes of the game discussing the proper pronunciation of CC Sabathia’s surname with her friend, then decided to just stick with CC). Had she been at the aforementioned game, she would have been pounding those Thundersticks together with gusto. She seemed fan.

She even appeared upset when the Brewers lost that game. It acted upset too, and I am certain that there are many people around Milwaukee that acted the exact same way. This seems like a good criterion for determining fandom, but here’s the thing, it isn’t. Sure, it’s meaningful, but acting upset, or happy for that matter, after a game doesn’t make you a fan (5).

What about game attendance, as my flamboyant and audacious friend suggests (6)? Sure, it seems like a sensible criterion, being there is important. But it is also easy to refute. There are a million justifiable reasons to not go to the game, here are a few, you are poor; you don’t like crowds; you’d rather watch on TV; beer is too expensive; parking is too expensive; food is too expensive; you can’t get tickets because they are sold out; you don’t have anyone to go with; you like a team on the other side of the country; etc. If you disqualified all of the people that skipped games for these reason, you wouldn’t have more than a handful of ‘real fans’ in America.

Wearing apparel and owning memorabilia is another way people “prove” their fandom. With the new, stylish team attire, fans can look good cheering for their favorite team, but so can girlfriends, moms and grandpa. Simply put, there is no way to determine one’s fanhood based on what they are wearing. There probably never was.

We’ve discussed a number of seemingly savvy arguments for fandom that aren’t qualifiers of a real fan; but why not? Because all of these things are things that you can fake or lie about. When the Packers were making their Super Bowl run, they cut a receiver (I forgot his name, but it may have been Ingram) to make space for Bad Moon Rison. I perceived this as totally unfair. I went on telling everyone that I didn’t like the Packers, but in reality I was watching every game and cheering for them. If you would have asked my parents if I was a Packer fan, they may have said no, but I was cheering for them every game, just not out loud.

The first question we must ask is whose point of view are we asking the question from? If you asked the team, they’d say the best fans are the ones who pay for the best seats. We know that isn’t true. Or the ones who spur others to go to the games with them by hosting numerous tailgates (7). But, we are talking about a comparison of fans here, so we are talking about what constitutes a good fan from a fans point of view.

First, we have already sort of acknowledged that there are different levels of fandom. This is important (but it is not to this specific argument), but my friend wasn’t saying that he could stump the Schwab and I couldn’t, he was saying I wasn’t a real fan.

I belong to an online community called RealGM (8). Many people on this site are so much smarter than I will ever be about sports, they understand things about salary structure, free agency, and myriad other details that are lost of regular fans. These are the super-fans. Yet, when I asked them (9) what it took to be a real fan, none of them mentioned any of the factors that have been brought up so far.

aboveAverage wrote: I don't think you have to attend a lot of games or call in to talk radio, or do any posting on an internet forum to be a real fan. I think you know if you're a true fan if you feel pain when your team loses a big game, and you feel euphoria when your team wins a big game. If the outcome of a game can affect your mood for the entire day, then you are a true fan. If you don't really care after the game, you probably are not a real fan of that team.

adamcz wrote: If you want a team to win and have no money at stake, you are a fan of that team.

MickeyDavis wrote: Attending games has no real bearing. Many people don't live close enough or can't afford to go to many games, that doesn't make them less than a fan.

Balls2TheWalls wrote: Arguing fandom is ridiculous. I agree with adamcz, and thinking you are a better fan than someone else is all masturbation.

BucksFan25226 wrote:Tell your friend he's a tool for saying that. Being a Cardinal fan, I guess he assumes I'm a bigger Brewer fan then both of you since I attended about 20 to 25 Brewer games this year?

These are some of the most intense sports fans I’ve ever had the pleasure of having discourse with and they aren’t picking these incredibly lofty, unreasonable criterion, they are saying that the only person who really knows if you are a fan is you.

And ultimately, this is what being a sports fan comes down to, the things that you can lie about to others, but can’t lie about to yourself. When the Packers lost the Super Bowl to the Broncos, I laid on my bed and cried real, genuine tears. When the Bucks lost (10) in the Eastern Conference Finals, I spent whole day furious with the NBA. When the Brewers lost, I took it really hard. No one really knows these about these feelings I had but me, which makes my buddies argument not only stupid, but superfluous.

There is something greatly unifying about being a fan. The city of Milwaukee felt alive this summer like never before, if you felt it, you are a fan. I saw more Brewers apparel than ever before, wearing it doesn’t make me a fan, but maybe noticing it kind of does. The games I was at were all intense, Milwaukee’s blue collar, white collar and no collar workers, all together, cheering for the team; those who felt the stadium rattle in their souls and got gooseflesh because of it, they are real fans, of course you wouldn’t know by sitting next to them. Which is kind of the beautiful thing about fandom, it is both intensely populist but also inherently private. That dichotomy simply cannot be ignored in a discussion of fandom. The display you put on (games attended, shirts bought, message boards frequented) isn’t directly proportionate (and sometimes is totally meaningless) to how much you really care.

And I think this is what bothers my friend more than anything, even though he probably wouldn’t put it that way, because he felt that he earned more of a right to be there (and be upset) than I did. But maybe he even knew that his elitist rhetoric was bullshit and he was just upset about how the game was going and wanted to take it out on someone. Maybe this was his misguided display of fandom (fan-on-fan verbal violence).

Ultimately, the only person that can properly say if you are a real fan or not is you. What others think about your fandom is about as useful as the Thundersticks were.

(1) They did make a lot of noise, although, I don’t know if you could say the noise was thunder-esque. Also, will the OKC Thunder patent these phallic balloons so we never have to see them again?
(2) I heard someone say on the radio that perhaps this was a bid to convince CC to come back to Milwaukee. To me, that would be like a restaurant giving you a mint at the end of your meal, hoping that the gesture would convince you to return. The fact is, there are a lot of more important factors to these decisions than mints and pinch-hitting appearances.
(3) I initially texted this person to find out the score of the Packers game from the Brewers game, go figure.
(4) My girlfriend, Michelle, would be pissed to hear of anyone challenging my fandom. In September we took a trip to Door County and over the course of 4 days, proceeded to either watch or listen to every Brewer game. During this trip, she inexplicably decided Brian Shouse was her favorite Brewer, seemingly because he doesn’t look like he belongs. Girls, I’ll never understand them.
(5) Usually, it just means your drunk. Michelle works in social work and she said that physical abuse spikes after Packer losses. This is why it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that this criterion solely determines who real fans are.
(6) According to him, he went to just shy of 20 games this year; there are 81 home games, there were 2 playoff games, he attended roughly 25% of the games. He’s the Jason Kendall of fans, (Kendall batted .246). So what would you call someone who went to 85% of the games, a real true fan?
(7) These are the people Malcom Gladwell talks about in ‘The Tipping Point.’ These Early Adopters inspire action in others, however, in sports, this only works if the team is playing well, unless we are talking about the Cubs.
(8) www.realgm.com, this is where I met the guys who I met Herb Kohl with…
(9) http://www.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=842199
(10) They didn’t really lose, they were screwed by the NBA, Bucks v. Lakers wasn’t as intriguing match-up as Sixers v. Lakers. Conveniently, most of the regular season awards went to Sixers players that year (MVP to Iverson; Defensive POY to Deke; Sixth Man to McKie; I think Coach OY to Brown) in an obvious ploy to make the Sixers seem like a real foe that had the chance of beating the Lakers (They didn’t).

I Hate My Friends: Interpreting facebook

“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. ... There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.” –Daniel Plainview (Daniel-Day Lewis) in P.T. Anderson’s excellent There Will Be Blood

Friend: (noun) a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.

I was recently having a discussion with a colleague at work about whether facebook was for ‘stalkers’ or ‘narcissists.’ In a micro sense, this debate is significant, in a macro sense it is probably one of the least important implications of social networking.

I have 156 friends on facebook, I’ve been friends with people who share my last name, people I’ve attended elementary school with, ex-girlfriends’ siblings and people who I am friends with on other websites. Of those 156 people, I possess 13 of their phone numbers, 12%.

The most common rationale I hear repeatedly in defense of facebook is that it helps us keep in touch with each other. This seems savvy, and I’m sure that in some cases its even true, yet I don’t think that is the reason most people are friends on facebook.

We are changing the definition of what a ‘friend’ is.

Do I share a bond of mutual affection with these 156 souls? The short answer is no. What does this say about our generation?

Well I think I know what it says about me, and I think that though most wouldn’t admit it, we all desire the same thing from facebook; we want to see others fail, though we are ashamed to admit that we enjoy the more lurid things in life.

But in this desire to see failure (which is all about perception, really), we are challenging an even larger, time-tested truth, which is this: people are meant to go away.

There is no legitimate reason that I should know what is going on with someone I haven’t seen since high school graduation, after all, I haven’t seen them for a reason: We aren’t friends. Yet now, thanks to facebook, we are... and I struggle to come to terms with what that really means.

There is nothing, beyond a callow desire to see people fail on a more personal level than was previously possible, that gives facebook any redeemable, intrinsic value. And this is what troubles me most, because before facebook, those desires could rarely be met in any meaningful way and we were better off for it.

Here’s an example: Let’s say an acquaintance from high school breaks up with his girlfriend, I’ll probably never hear about it. If I do, it’ll be from (mostly likely) at best a tertiary source that won’t have any specific knowledge beyond the breakup happening and maybe some suspect gossip about why it went down. If I do even consider this beyond the cursory nature I’d consider anything, it’d probably be on a very basic, meaningless level. Then, assuming I was out, I’d get drunk and probably forget that I was even told.

However, let’s say this person is my ‘friend’ on facebook. All of the sudden, I am informed that they are now single. I can go to their page (potentially) and see how they feel about on their status update, check out pictures of the formally happy couple, read their wall correspondence and a myriad of other things. This is impossible to resist.

The problem with all of this information is that none of it is good information, it’s information overload, and it’s very easy to get hung up on. We are making the basic mistake of lionizing more information as opposed to better information, and the fact is that quantity is never better than quality. We aren’t supposed to know.

Trying to be objective, I can hear people saying that I am making something out of nothing, I’ve considered this argument, but I don’t think it is so. Here’s why:

A lot of people have been hung up on the famous (or I suppose in Europe, royalty), we’ve been conditioned to follow these famous people through media, we make the agreement that we care about them and they are important. This is all well and good, and in most people this desire for knowledge about the famous ends with reading US Weekly or checking out PerezHilton. We don’t pay it much thought after that.

But with facebook, we are all celebrities. Through facebook we are informed about every aspect of a person’s life that they are willing to share, we read about them, see what others are saying about them, look at pictures of them drunk and, most importantly, hope that they fail. How is this any different they being a celebophile?

When someone tells you they are a “facebook stalker,” this is what they mean.

And why is this bad? Because it dehumanizes people, the chance to make a meaningful connection is there, yet time and time again, people choose not to make it. I can only imagine that these kinds of interactions will begin to play themselves out in person as well. How many times have you gotten a friend request from someone from your past without any other correspondence? This person wants to know your dirty laundry, they want to watch you fail.

But, when everyone is a star, then no one is a star, which is the essential conundrum that faces facebook users; in a world that thrives on drama, where is the humanity? When all of the things that we love are right there for everyone else to make a value judgment on, how do we make real connections and when do those things stop mattering?

Have you ever talked with someone before and asked a question, but already knew the answer because of facebook, it gives you a slightly creepy sensation. You shouldn’t possess this information but you do. Maybe, sometimes you are even asking a question that you already know the answer to, so you can in turn ask a question that you couldn’t have asked if you didn’t know the information. There is something very wrong with all of this.

Sensory overload will be the end of us all… stay out of the light.