The Facebook Frenzy
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
For most of the past two months, I’ve been on a Facebook strike. Such abstinence seems to be unthinkable for someone of my generation. Facebook has been a part of my life since 2004 and a great way to keep up with friends since moving across the pond. Recently however, with my life taking some very odd turns and many of my friend’s choosing to go a more traditional route in their own lives, I needed a break. At my age, the holidays mean an onslaught of baby pictures and engagement announcements which, somehow, Facebook can manage to bundle together in some sort of conspiracy that can bombard you with the idea that everyone else in the world is young, beautiful, fertile, and knitting baby blankets.
During this time of self inflicted celibacy two events occurred. First, Facebook decided to turn itself into some sort of historical time capsule and second, a friend who had just announced that she was having twins, miscarried.
I think all of us in life hate to think that nothing, even the most natural and yet miraculous milestones we can have, is ever guaranteed. If the ring is on our finger or the pregnancy test shows a red plus sign, we have made a contract with fate. We are going to have reason to celebrate, we can shout it to the world in our Facebook statuses, and the happy event will happen. Guaranteed.
And on the one hand, why not? We should celebrate at full steam our times of joy. But many are finding out, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that the hope for our lives we place in the future, sometimes doesn’t come. One week after my friend announced to the world her amazing news, hew new world was crushed. Despite our open book policy, it seems not a whole lot of miscarriages are announced on Facebook.
What will happen when we are able to look back at lives of the new people we meet and see that, well, there seems to be a kid missing from current family photos, or she used to wear a diamond ring and now she doesn’t? If its impossible to avoid pain and disappointment in our lives, do we really want our new acquaintances finding out about these events by our status updates and wall posts followed by years of silence?
Facebook, I believe, presents a unique problem in that it’s main population it that of young adults. Ours is a generation which has, seemingly, always been protected and was able to hold off being an adult just a little bit longer thanks to grad schools and the misleading belief thing things always improve over time. My friends are just entering a point where they are discovering loss and heartache. For many of them they do not know how to be cautiously optimistic.
Perhaps, by seeing disappointments of years past we make ourselves more vulnerable to prying eyes. Or maybe we are simply made aware of our vulnerabilities which are already there. We all have pain from our pasts we would like to forget, and pain coming at us which we could never imagine. Perhaps a tool such as Facebook allows us to share in our joys. But the question is: Do any of us have the strength which can only come from vulnerability in sharing each other’s sorrow?