Ben jij wie jij bent op Facebook, of ben je daar iemand anders? Iets minder dan jezelf, iets anders — een meer gepolijste versie van jou, een ideale projectie, een oppervlakkige uitvoering van wie je graag uitstraalt te zijn?

Ik wel, zoveel is zeker. Zo zeg ik dingen op Facebook die ik nooit in het echt zou zeggen of schrijven, zoals daar zijn: “Dat is het grappigste dat ik ooit heb gezien!” En: “Vet! Had ik nog nooit van gehoord!” En: “Haha, wat geestig! Dankjewel voor het doorsturen en tot gauw!”

Veel uitroeptekens, vrolijke berichten, enorm loze teksten ook vaak.

Dat we niet helemaal de gebrekkige en rauwe versie van onszelf zijn op Facebook weten we allemaal en is op zich niet erg — niemand zegt dat dat moet. Maar het is wel een bijzonder vreemd gebeuren, als je erover nadenkt.

Zadie Smith schreef hier in The New York Review of Books onlangs een razend interessant stuk over, naar aanleiding van de film over Facebook-oprichter en oppertsaar Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network. (Goeie film ook, trouwens.)

Hier enkele passages, maar lees vooral het hele stuk: Generation Why?

Master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) (…) understands us well, and has written a short and frightening book, You Are Not a Gadget… Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier argues, which is

based on [a] philosophical mistake…the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.

We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”? What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

(…)

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

(…)

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

Lees Generation Why?