I saw the movie about the invention of, and legal battles over, faceBook when it came out.  I believed the portrait of a smart, angry, now billionaire Harvard nerd initially motivated by revenge on a girl who turned him down.  I left the movie house feeling confirmed in my mostly queasy insights into the heart of the alienating thing called Social Media.  

There are excellent and handy uses for social media, it can’t be denied.  But having pages where we post things about ourselves (he said silently, writing the words on a page where he posts things about himself) with the aim of becoming the coolest and most popular kid in virtual high school by amassing the most disembodied avatar friends?  An invitation to the illusion of intimacy and friendship with virtually none of the risks or rewards.

I know a tortured soul, a brilliant guy who has survived untreated bulimia for decades, with literally thousands of friends on faceBook.  When he leaves his computer and walks on the street, you can see loneliness radiating off him like spokes of despair around a downtrodden comic book character.  He’s a classic case, no doubt.   I’m sure there are many otherwise well-adjusted, self-loving people with robust social lives, friends they talk to, have dinner with, laugh and cry with in person, friends they’d leap into traffic to help out of a tight spot, who casually maintain faceBook pages and have many faceBook friends who are not bravely posing portraits of alienated desperation.

Here’s what got me thinking about faceBook today.  I was forced by the marketing arm of fezBook, now energetically monetizing itself as all great things in our society must, to create a personal page in order to continue maintaining my wehearyou.net student-run animation page.  Reluctantly, seeing that they’d made good on their threats not to allow me to post things to the business site I’d created, I set up a personal page.  

I put up one recent photo of two goats kissing a demurely smiling young man and left my own avatar a dashing grey silhouette with a shock of Conan-like hair coming to a jaunty soft-serve ice cream cone point at the top. At least that’s my memory of my avatar.  Good to have my hair back, I thought idly.

Literally one minute after I put up the page I had my first friend request.  Within hours a small flurry of friend requests from people I’d be glad to be friends with: in real life.  There were several from people I’d never heard of, faceBook friends of the two actual people I’d friended at first.  

I wrote a personal email to each person I otherwise knew explaining that I wouldn’t be active on facebook, had set up the personal page as a requirement for continuing to run my business page.  I asked each how they were, hoped they were doing well.  Told each one that I’d be happy to be in contact.  I noted that my “likes” on the kids’ animation page had oddly fallen from 92 to 87 in recent months and that I was trying to get to 100.  I asked them to please click the link and “like” the animation page.  You can do that here, if you like, dear reader, and afterwards, for a more fun experience, pop over here.

Alas, though predicable, of the dozen or so who asked me to become fezBag friends, only one clicked the link and liked the page.  She also sent me an email saying “Done.  Like these links, if you like,” and sent me two links to her pages to like.  Quid pro quo, fair is fair, like and like, done, and it took me about 15 seconds.   None of the others I’d emailed wrote back.   Perhaps I’d violated the first rule of Social Media– nothing personal!   So much for being friends on faceBarf, I thought, folding one half of my face into a Popeye-like smirk.

Truly, I prefer to talk to Siri.  At least you can have something like a conversation with that adorable robot.  She actually tries to respond to what you say; when she’s stumped she’ll say “wait, I don’t understand.”   That statement is one of the most intelligent and currently under used replies in human interaction.   It shows, in very short order, that you are trying to understand.  No small feat.  

It’s not hard to imagine from Siri’s enthusiastic, sometimes whimsical replies, that she has a cute little personality and, if not smart as an actual whip, is smart as a virtual whip and a better friend than people who reach out to be friends with no strings attached and can’t be troubled to click a link to perform the smallest of kindnesses to a potential facebook pal.