Hey Man, I Facebooked Your Mom Last Night

When I phoned home last night, my mother skipped past all perfunctory greetings and nervously confided, "Facebook ... is like an addiction, isn't it?" I sighed long and deep before responding, "Yes." Then, a caveat: "But unlike me, you have a meaningful life outside of it, so I don't need you getting addicted to it." I've passed on friend requests from not only her, but also nearly 20 other aunts and uncles. Not necessarily because I have anything to hide, apart from an inexplicable photo series involving a red bird and I'm not about to take that down to appease people with ornithological hang-ups. I just don't want people whose last memories of me may involve me awkwardly plunking my way through a piano recital to ask me at a family reunion, over a decade since, "So I saw you're a Facebook Fan of Floria Sigismondi. Who or what is that?" Mostly since I'd respond, "Oh, um, I don't know, get away from me." Sadly though, like a stubborn case of ringworm, Facebook looks poised to stick around for the long haul. What this means for those of us who've been on since the dawn of time (2005?): More awkward family members trying to awkwardly friend us and sending us awkward private messages! All sorts of awkwardness!

What’s most upsetting is how the emergence of entire families on Facebook takes the spirit of Keeping Up With the Jones and transfers it onto a meaningless digital medium. It’s frightening because the aggregation of information and people’s personal lives fosters a depressingly competitive mentality. And while you’re happy that everyone else in your family has accomplished, and everyone else in your family is happy that you’ve accomplished so little, both of you end up constantly sizing each other up. The information is always there: Education, line of work, events attended, interests, music.

In one way, it’s a bit like the old-fashioned familial backbiting of yore. All that information becomes ripe for gossip and scandal. Let’s say on a good day, you post a status message that’s essentially harmless to the point of dull. One cousin takes it the wrong way, relays the information to another relative, who passes it forward and along the way, one pathologically sinister aunt decides to embellish the story. Then months later, all of you are sitting down for dinner and everyone regards you with the same warmth that they’d handle a slimy alien. So this is why, while you love your aunts and uncles, sinister though some may be, you abstain from Facebooking them. Because screaming, “Stay out of Facebook, you olds!” is ineffective. Trust me. I’ve tried it.

Worse yet is when this similar competition superimposes itself onto other facets of your childhood—making mothers and fathers out of the unlikeliest (most unqualified?) candidates. Namely: high school! One day, you log on to find out that from your high school, Boring Ugly Person A and Boring Ugly Person B have tied the noose knot, and it spurs you to ask all sorts of questions about if Boring Ugly People A-B can be so happy, then why is True Love like that of a poorly written Carrie Bradshaw column for you? Then come the pictures! Oversharestravaganza! Wedding pictures, honeymoon pictures, lazy Sundays at home and eventually baby pictures. And then you realize that the emergence of Boring Ugly Baby A isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact it’s a boon reminding you that you, unlike the Boring Uglies, have a promising life ahead of you.

But how to resolve such crises otherwise? For parents, there are classes at Stanford dedicated to teaching them the ins and outs of social networking. For the rest of us, there’s this strange thing where you leave your laptops behind and go explore the world. I think Angelina Jolie was in a movie that the same name as that strange thing: Life or Something Like It.