i.

“God please wake me up from this nightmare.”

–A Facebook friend’s post

 I have 461 Facebook friends and, you know, shit happens. So the odds of shit happening to a few of these “friends” is likely. And shit has happened. And I have watched it. And it’s weird. It feels like I am somewhere I shouldn’t be; looking at something I shouldn’t be looking at. Like I am hiding in some person’s closet with the door open a crack, peaking into their bedroom watching them sob and kick their feet alone on their bed.

It wouldn’t feel this way if these people were my real friends. If they were my real friends and tragedy struck, I probably wouldn’t be spending so much time on their Facebook page. I would be with them, or I would be on the phone with them, or I would be thinking about them. If they were my real friend I would also know the whole story, the whole, tragic story. So I wouldn’t have any reason to keep checking back to their Facebook page. Trying to find clues in the comments. Tip offs in their posts. To figure out what exactly happened. Tragic detail by tragic detail. What happened that was so bad to this person that their homefeed is tumbling with the “I am so sorry” and the “You are in my prayers” posts from friends of the friend who I don’t really know in the first place.

Facebook’s Edgerank score is determined by the profile pages you visit and interact with the most. The pages that host the photo albums you always click on right when they are posted, or the profile that you often comment on, or the profile where you just look through the comments. Profiles with the highest Edgerank score will have the greatest visibility in your own newsfeed. (That is, when you are looking at your homefeed through the default “Top News,” as opposed to “Most Recent,” which is just a timeline of post updates.)

Over the last year or so I’ve noticed that the “friends” I am seeing in my homefeed regularly aren’t really my friends at all. They are the “friends” who I watch. I watch them in a similar way that I watch Real Housewives of New York or Teen Mom, I watch them mainly as a smutty pastime.

You know these people. The major over-sharers. The ones who don’t hold back anything. The ones who you watch (in smutty delight) when they post something that is so inappropriate or disgusting or over the top that you call your (real) friend to tell them to look at it too. You say, Can you believe they posted this? Why would they ever post this? You’re not annoyed, you’re sort of giddy. You’re giddy in the same way as when you’re watching a really ridiculous fight Andy Cohen is trying to mediate on Bravo. By checking back to these “friend’s” Facebook profiles you know you’re not being friendly, you’re not being a nice person, you’re not checking in. You are entertaining yourself. You are rubber-necking.

ii.

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”

-Marshall McLuhan, 1964

If Facebook allowed personal profiles to have their own analytics, in the same way an administrator of a Facebook brand page is able to see the Insights for the page—what wall post got the most views, what day brought the most unique users to the page—it might get creepy. Birthdays would be high profile view days, so would life events like a relationship status change to “Engaged,” say. But would it start to get disgusting if you realize boatloads of unique visitors are pouring in after, for example, your mother died? Would it be too much? Or would it be comforting? The friends, the strangers, who are coming to your profile, more than you ever realized, to watch. To watch what happens next. To watch whatever that terrible thing that happened, happen.

As an owner of a Facebook profile page shouldn’t we have rights to this data? To realize our reach? To comprehend the audience of our lives?

 iii.

“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness.”

–Erving Goffman, 1959

Facebook is a two-way street though. I am participating too. As I mentioned, I have 461 friends. Some of whom I invited, some of whom requested to come in, many of whom I completely forget are there at all. To be honest, when I am putting up a Facebook post I am only consciously aware of a handful. Namely, the few close friends who the post or photo or link might be directed towards, and then I often remember that my coworkers are also watching too. But that’s it, really. All of those other hundreds of people in the middle? I sort of have forgotten they are there at all.

Who am I? To those hundreds of people in the middle. Am I a person or am I, like many of them are to me, just transforming more and more into a character of a story I am watching? Chapter by chapter being written in status posts and photo albums and relationship statuses and colleges attended, all in real time on my homefeed. Look! It’s someone I hardly know’s birthday. Look, there is the bat shit mom who posts about her child’s diarrhea. Look, there is that guy who I never knew in middle school in the first place but now he’s a body builder and I really do get a kick out of his over the top, often times actually really sexist, Facebook posts he blasts out All The Time. I just can never believe he says the things he does.

I don’t know these people. Or actually, I know these people really well. I know these people so much more than I feel like I should know them. So much more than they probably realize I know.

iv.

“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”

-Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Facebook has brought the lives of really loose acquaintances and near strangers into my living room. I am obsessed with a boy named Henry whom I never met. Who is dead. There are other dead people I am obsessed with whom I very likely would never have realized died at all if it weren’t for Facebook. But Henry is the most lasting dead person obsession.

Henry is the most lasting obsession because his mother, who is a mom blogger, continues to provide content about him. Ongoing content that pops into my homefeed, which I click and then read all about on the blog that was created specifically for Henry’s death. Which was of a drug overdose when he was 18. She created the blog, “Justice for Henry,” because she thinks that the Knoxville police mishandled the case very badly, and that there are guilty people involved in her son’s overdose that were never taken to justice. This is a big part of why she maintains the blog, the Facebook profile, and the updates. But I think the larger part is that she needs a reason to continue to write about her son. A reason to keep him relevant. To keep the posts and statuses alive. Facebook, social networks, blogs, have given us all a new place to live. Maintaining a blog and a Facebook profile on behalf of her son, in a way this mother is keeping her son who is dead, alive in our homefeeds.

Have you watched a person die who has a Facebook profile? And how that Facebook profile turns into a memorial. And how at first the profile overflows with posts about people who can’t believe their friend is dead. And time passes as it does- the weeks, the months and then the years. And there is less and less posting on the Facebook profile. An occasional “I still miss you” from somebody close. A few people noting the anniversary of the person’s birthday, or of the day he or she died. But the posts are infrequent. Months in between. The profile begins to remind you of a gravestone with a bunch of old, dried out flowers half blown away in the wind.

You have stopped checking the profile by this point anyways. Because you didn’t really know this person in the first place. You were just their Facebook friend for one reason or another. You just happened to watch their story unfold–in photo albums and comment streams– until that tragic, shocking end. That you wouldn’t have probably even known about in the first place. If it wasn’t for Facebook.

*This is poem is pulled from data from Google Insights. So it’s true. Contrived, but true.

When people ask

Is God real?

to Google, they most often are asking,

What is God?

Is Jesus real?

Who is God?

Is Jesus God?

They also type

into their search browser

(are they alone?)

God is love

God is fake

Where is God?

Maybe God is not in the United States

because that is the country

the most people are asking

to Google, if God is real.

(Eritrea is the country where people just write

God

to Google, the most.)

Zambia

is the country the most people write

Prayer

to Google, and then Zimbabwe,

Uganda, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya

the Philippines, Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria.

Help me.

In Ghana, they say

Help me.

In Uganda and Nigeria and Jamaica and Kenya and South Africa and the United States and Thailand,

they say, Help me.

They say, Help me to

Help me find

God help me

Help me do

I need help

Somebody help me

into their search browser

(are they alone?).

The most people asking for

Cocaine help, are in New York.

The most people asking for

Meth help, are in Arizona.

The most people who search for Happiness

live in the Philippines

and the most people who search for Depression

live in the United States.

In Somalia, more people write, Muslim

than anywhere else in the world and in Lesotho

the most people write Education into their search browsers

(Where is Lesotho?)

Followed by Swaziland, Tanzania, Malawi,

Botswana, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

They are searching for Higher education

Distance education

Online education.

Dream teeth falling out

is most popular in the United Kingdom;

Dream of fire

is most popular in the United States;

Dream of flying

is only popular in the United States.

And people ask about

Dreams

in the Philippines, the United States, Namibia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Botswana, Lebanon,

they write, In dreams

Sweet dreams

Meaning of dreams.

In India, Singapore, Sweden, El Salvador, Mexico, Uruguay and Pakistan

people ask Google about

Broken dreams, the most.

Meet 15-year old New Jersey twins, M. and L., who surprised me with their love of Tumblr and their well developed understanding of privacy settings.

Let’s start with Tumblr. 13-17 year olds only make up 17% of Tumblr users, 18-34 year olds lead the way here. Tumblr is a micro-publishing blog—sort of like Twitter meets Facebook, sort of—and has a fraction of a user base as Facebook, though it seems like that’s the case with every other website these days. I was surprised that both girls listed Tumblr right next to Facebook as the social networking site they actively use  (M. also uses Twitter, while L. still has a MySpace page but “no one really uses that anymore.”)

I love talking to young people because they have a knack at opening up little worlds I had no idea existed. This is not often the case when talking to adults about social media, whom are often either following, or consciously choosing not to follow, the cyber herd. Their answers can feel predictable; there can be a sense that their opinions are formed by popular news and media that they have consumed about the technologies, less of an opinion from actually, openly, using and experiencing the social site. This isn’t often the case with younger people, who are more prolific in use and are leading the way in how we are using and living with these technologies. Which is pretty cool, if you think about it, pretty Louis and Clark-esq.

M. told me she liked Tumblr because, “I like looking at all the pictures, memes and gifts people post. I also like to post things about my problems and my life to people that don’t actually know me so it’s not weird/awkward.”

I love the idea of putting a thought or an idea into a place where people have the possibility to see it—to see you—but nothing more than that. It’s like putting a message in a bottle. In thinking about social media and how we are “evolving” our daily routines, ways of interacting with one another, and social norms I continue to come back to Erving Goffman’s 1961 sociological book, “The Presentation of Self Online.” Goffman believed that we acted two ways; the way we acted in “public,” by that I mean in front of others, and the ways we acted privately, in front of no one.

Goffman’s “dramaturgical analysis” observed that when a person comes into contact with other people that person will try to control the impression that others might make of her or him while at the same time trying to figure out the other person(s) s/he is interacting with, while also actively avoiding being embarrassed or embarrassing others.

The reverse of this is when people are “off stage,” or in private. This is when the person can be themselves and get rid of their role or identity they have to carry around in society. For M. and L. this is being an American teenager. I remember this feeling when I was a teenager as the action of walking into my bedroom and closing the door behind me, and that heavy sense of relief that came with it.

But now there is this whole other element thrown into the mix. Where kids can decide the sort of Public that they share their feelings and ideas. It’s no longer the choice of whether to write it in my diary or tell my friends. By this I mean, do I write it in my diary = private. Do I tell friends = public. Now there are layers and layers of publics that are very difficult to understand- that are nearly impossible to imagine a boundary around. (The diary thing actually brings me to a question I wished I asked M. and L., do they maintain diaries? I’d like to focus on this in the future, if and how diaries are being maintained in the wave of social networking sites. Is there anything left to share only with ourselves; not a variation of visible/mostly-invisible-but-still-public Public?)

M. is actively aware of which Publics she chooses to share information. She is also believes that there are some Publics where sharing is OK and there are other Publics where it’s not socially acceptable. She writes: “I do think people can say too much about themselves. Not on Twitter or Tumblr but definitely on Facebook. I don’t want to see people talking about their boyfriends/girlfriends or what they did every second of the day.”

I wonder if her separation of Twitter and Tumblr from Facebook is because for her Twitter and Tumblr are more anonymous or because their status posts aren’t as sticky? Twitter and Tumblr feels like a reel constantly streaming with updates, whereas Facebook feels a little more like it traps you in some people’s minds- and those minds can be weird. Still, I find the distinction of sharing things in one place OK, while another place not OK interesting. And wonder whether that is more heavily based on the architecture of the site or the audience within the site, or a combination of both?

Both M. and L. believe social networking sites make the world both better and worse. L. explains: “Social networking sites are just like everything else, there are good and bad outcomes. Yes, they’re probably very distracting from school and work, but most students would do fine with or without these sites. There are also ways they make the world better. You can know what’s happening with family/friends that live far away or keep in touch with a childhood friend.”  Both girls also agree that they think they will always use a social networking site. “I’m pretty much addicted,” admits M.

I was impressed with their understanding of privacy settings. When asked if people can put too much information online L. explained: “I don’t think people put too much information on their profiles. It doesn’t really matter what the information is, but who can see it. If you set your profile to private and only let a certain group of people see it, then it’s not a problem what people say about themselves.” In other words, you stay aware of your public. What is missing is the idea that people can so easy share what you put online to people outside of your controlled public, but that’s another story.

The notion of actively being in control of your public, or just the same, of actively not being in control of a public; releasing your thoughts out into a more anonymous audience for the freedom which that allows, shows an  understanding of not just producing and digesting a mass amount content, but of considering where exactly that content is going. It’s a lot to consider when, as a teenager, you already have a lot of work to do thinking about who you are in the first place.

Want to know two people who are not in M. and L.’s publics? Their parents, who I have been told, are allowed on Facebook, only as long as they don’t friend M. or L.

Update: Neither M. or L. maintain a diary.

Arman grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is currently in the 3rd year of his Bachelors program at East West University, also in Dhaka, where he is majoring in accounting. I met Arman over two years ago in a Facebook discussion group regarding the work of danah boyd. At the time I was perusing through the internet trying to find people who were interested in social networking sites so I could interview them for my thesis work. I wanted people from all over the world. The fact that I could do this pretty easily is nuts, if you think about it.

I remember Arman responded with really thoughtful answers about his experience and usage of social media. We became Facebook friends and therefore stayed loosely connected in the way you do with your Facebook friends. It’s as if they have drawn open their living room curtains for you. And you are able to stand there and think, what a strange and interesting peak into this individual’s life on the other side of the world. We often speak of social networking being connected to voyeurism in a negative way, but doesn’t it also allow for people to broaden perspectives? To marvel in the similarities, note the differences– but mostly the similarities I think, of other people’s lives? People, who in a different time before social networking sites existed like this, would never have “windows” to open in the first place.

BANGLADESH

Today there are 995,560 Facebook users in Bangladesh. This is 0.6% of the population. To put this in perspective, in 2006 there were only 500,000 Internet users in the country. Though Bangladesh has a low GDP, it has impressively created a very competitive mobile telephone market with 36% of the population mobile subscribers. (This always reminds me how backwards America feels with mobile technology. How I had perfect mobile service in rice fields in Uthai-thani, Thailand but I still get choppy service in my parent’s house 40 miles outside of New York City- how my phone calls drop in Union Square pretty much every morning. And how social media marketing ought to concern itself much more with mobile and thinking outside of a US-centric framework because mobile is where the entire world is now and where the entire world will continue to move.)

ARMAN’S BACKGROUND

Arman was an early internet subscriber. His family bought their first computer when he was 10, in 1999. In the beginning, his family used the computer to watch movies on the weekends. In 2000, they started using the internet. They used it primarily for communicating with relatives living abroad. Arman remembers using YAHOO, as it was the most popular portal at that point.

“We used YAHOO not only for mailing purposes but also to keep updated with the Western world. My brother and I are technological enthusiasts, and we frequently browsed through websites, legion hardware, pcstates and hexus.net. Other than that, my father used it to collect medicine related information.”

“It was also the center of attraction for any get-togethers held in our home; since computers were not present in households at the extent it is now. Internet was scarce and costly back then.” Arman points out that when he was younger, up until 2002, he had much more access to computers than his peers. “Only a handful of my friends had similar access and interest in computers.” As Arman continues to explain his involvement in computers and the internet it becomes exceedingly obvious that he was indeed a technological enthusiasts which both separated him from his peers while bringing him closer to the Western world.

“I was an avid fan of Wikipedia and answers.com- always browsing to get information about stuff like comic characters, great personalities of the past, various health issues, and almost anything I could not get answers from my elders. It became such a trend that rather than answering my questions by themselves they just instructed me to wiki it!”

Arman admits that most of his peers at this time just saw the computer as a way to escalate their status and that he didn’t have many friends during this period as his peers didn’t really share his interests. But this all changed when he began studies in college and university. “Now I have around 350 friends in my Facebook page.”

SPECIFIC SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORMS

Arman was 12 when he first began using e-mail. 5 years ago, when he was around 15, he joined his first social networking site, HI5, afterwards he began using Facebook and Netlog. Arman has stopped using HI5 and Netlog but he remains an active user of Facebook, which he joined 4 years ago.

“I joined HI5 due to peer pressure, in an attempt to show my creativity in designing homepages among friends. It was just for fun, and I stopped using HI5 after some time. But I joined Facebook mostly due to influence from my cousin, Ishaque, who lives in UAE [United Arab Emirates]. He was an early adapter, and he hooked me up. Afterwards many of my local friends started using it, so I was semi-regular to Facebook. Only when I was started going to university did I become completely a regular user, and it has been the same ever since.”

I think that’s an interesting point Arman highlights because it points to a key difference between HI5 and Facebook. Or a webpage, blog or to an extent MySpace, from Facebook. Facebook is just about a place to connect with one another, to see and be seen, and that is it’s only utility. It doesn’t serve as a platform where a user can showcase their graphic design or coding skills. It doesn’t have the utility to highlight a technical talent. Facebook’s purpose depends on having “friends” in the space.

Arman only communicates with “strangers” in Facebook if they have a mutual friend. “Other than that I interact with most people in real life.”

Facebook is the most popular social networking site for Arman’s family and friends. Most of his friends are on it, as well as most of his cousins and his brother.

PRIVACY

Arman is “moderately” concerned with privacy. “I don’t put much sensitive information in the web at all. [...] I remain very protective of pictures I upload, especially when there are female pictures. Personally I don’t see much point in the fact that information put in social networking sites is made public. People who are putting this information know what the implications are of making this public, and should deal with them accordingly.”

GENDER

The most extreme Facebook user gender imbalance is in Bangladesh, where men outnumber women by a ration of over 2.5 men using Facebook for every female Facebook user.

“In Bangladeshi culture, it is pretty unorthodox to talk with females directly,” Arman writes. “I believe this cultural paradox is dissolving through the popularity of social networking sites. Through sites it is easier to chat or message with others, even though in person they have been overcome with shyness.”

I probe Arman to elaborate on how social media is challenging fixed gender norms within his culture.

“I have a female friend of mine who is very shy and could not even talk to boys in school. After she started going for university many of her male classmates added her in Facebook. Even though she talked very little in public, she started interacting with them online. Now I see a lot of her shyness has dissolved and she is comfortable talking to the boys in public.”

This all makes me wonder what cultural norms social networking sites are challenging in the western societies?

Arman mentioned “fake profiles” several times and I had no idea what he meant. I asked him if he was referring to something related to spam messaging.

“It’s not spam,” Arman explained. “Many people do it to hack people’s Facebook pages. There are instances when these fake profiles are just used for fun, like testing the truthfulness of boyfriends/girlfriends or to make fun of friends. Like if a male friend starts talking nasty/romantic with a fake female profile, his friends will laugh at him for some time.”

Essentially, people make profiles with stolen pictures and forged names of “fake” people. And they maintain these profiles by talking to others and impersonating them. Men make fake profiles of women and impersonate them.

Arman stresses that it’s an issue. “If you go through some Bangladeshi newspapers, you’ll find there have been lots of talks regarding teasing and other means of maltreatment towards females. Now that technology has been made so available for the masses, these people use social networking sites to do their dirty work. [...] Some do it just for fun, some do it to get back to their ex, some do it just to ruin others emotional states. [...] These issues are spreading fast.”

I am reminded of the craze circling cyber-bullying recently in the U.S. Of “bullies” having a new medium to translate this meanness through. A medium that has much more far-reaching and complicated implications.

SMALL BUSINESSES

When asked what is the best part about social networking sites in society, Arman responded that they are able to promote small-scale businesses to very effectively create hype and promote products and services. An example of this he highlighted was Roll Out Clothing.

Arman “likes” pages of brands he finds on Facebook when he actually likes the brand. As well as to get updated information regarding the brand’s latest products and news.

CONCLUSION

Arman believes that he will use social networking sites for the rest of his life. He believes that these sites will constantly evolve to meet people’s wants to personally communicate with one another and people will never stop using them.

This reminds me of my relationship with Arman. Of drawing open a window into casual corners of our every day lives. Of inviting people into our lives. To connect to one another like one great herd. To be curious. To share. To be human.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan, 1964

About two years ago I wrote my master’s thesis largely around that quote. I interviewed all different sorts of people asking them questions about which social networking sites they use, how they use them, and why. The strict nature of an academic thesis didn’t allow me to flesh out certain stories as much as I would have liked. Essentially, my thesis didn’t allow me to highlight personal anecdotes. I aim to do that now.

My principal interest isn’t social media. It never has been. I am principally interested in the ways people choose to define and identify themselves. The ways people articulate themselves into being. Zoning in on social networking sites, for me, was an easy way to do this. I thought that looking around a MySpace page and asking a kid questions about why they chose to do what with that page, was the same thing as poking around a teenager’s bedroom. Seeing what posters they put up, the person they are trying to be and why. This is the stuff that has always interested me.

I have a big respect for personal stories. I hold onto stories, I remember them. There is a lot in the news, media, advertising and businesses about social media. It’s a buzz word. Because it’s a buzz word there are more and more people trying to say what social media is, what it is not, and how it works.

I think that McLuhan quote is fitting because when he says, “We reshape our tools,” that “we” is ambiguous. In one way there is collective reshaping, but there is also an individual reshaping. Based on our lives, our past experiences, our point of view, no one person will ever see something the exact same.

My goal for the social MEdia series is to host a collection of stories about people from all around the world sharing their relationships with social media. How they use it, how they see it, and how they see themselves connected to it (and thereby, perhaps connected to one another.)

If you have a story to share and would like to be interviewed for this series please contact me at: marylorraine.snauffer@gmail.com

Stories can be anonymous.

Ironic or brilliant that I was reading The New Yorker’s Mark Zuckerberg profile the moment Diaspora launched its developer release? Ask anyone who I talk the Nerd to, and you’ll figure out that I’ve been counting down the days for this project to launch.

Look, real quick though, is one thing I was thinking about during this Zuckerberg article. The movie coming out, The Social Network, paints Zuckerberg as a douchy socially awkward nerd. The writer of the book the movie is based on, Sorkin, is arguably kinder (arguably) saying, “The movie is not meant as an attack [...] Zuckerberg spends the first one hour and fifty-five minutes as an anti-hero and the last five minutes as a tragic hero.”

Zuckerberg’s douche bag persona, which has been shaping well before this movie, is based on a lot of college IMs and other incriminating details that have leaked as a result of lawsuits. A popular example:

Zuck: so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

Zuck: just ask

Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?

Zuch:  people just submitted it

Zuch: i don’t know why

Zuch: they “trust me”

Zuch: dumb fucks

Zuckerberg acknowledges his “sophomoric former self, he insists, shouldn’t define who he is now,” (The New Yorker, 9/20/10). I’d just quickly like to point out what Zuckerberg said in regards to the Facebook privacy controversy last year:

“You have one identity … The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

danah boyd went off on this point (and I shortly followed), by stressing the “I’m-a-white-male” privilege that sort of attitude exemplifies. I just think it’s funny, funny like “gotcha,” and worth noting that Zuckerberg made his bed with this one. Forcing one identity on people. Maybe we’d be more forgiving of his “sophomoric” past-self, and more willing to assume that he has changed because time has passed, but since we (and by “we” I mean his 500 million Facebook users) aren’t allowed more than one identity in our work/life/love/sex/freak/nerd worlds anymore. Neither are you, buddy.

So it’s in this context that Diaspora has launched. A “social network” that’s goal is to give users ownership of their digital selves. As your digital self is becoming a “realer and realer” thing– and by that I mean, not a segment of who you are, not a recreation, but something much larger and more fluid, like your human cells; having control of your digital self should be akin to a human right.

Read through Diaspora’s “Developer Release” here. I am particularly amped up about how they are working on “Facebook Integration,” as Facebook’s white knuckle grip on our personal artifacts (i.e. tagged pictures of the last 6 years of our lives) is a big reason people don’t migrate from the platform.

Anyway, so as I sit here drinking Erin’s organic cherry beer (thanks, Erin), I want to say cheers and good luck to Diaspora. The first social network that has truly excited me in years.

This weekend’s New York Times published, “As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out.” The rather unsubstantial article discussed the issue of when a user dies and the profile remains, the strange and unique feeling of seeing the deceased friend reminder to “Keep In Touch,” on the left hand side of users’ homefeeds. It then devolved into the ways Facebook is trying to deal with the “death issue” especially because as they point out,  “Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group, with 6.5 million signing up in May alone, three times as many as in May 2009.”

But this has always been an issue because even when Facebook was primarily a college-aged social network, as we know, college-aged kids still die. But when they die it’s often sudden and alarming and it has the power to bring larger numbers of “grief tourists” to the deceased Facebook page to explore, and gawk, and wonder. (Cyber grief tourism, a whole other article I’ll write some other time.)

For better or worse, it seems these days Facebook is the holder of the “most” information about its users’ lives. Unlike Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, etc., platforms where users might be posting aspects of their lives, highlighting projects or hobbies, but often times not revealing their whole selves, Facebook’s platform and user patterns ask for quite a lot of self reveal and to share pretty personal stuff with friends. Mark Zuckerberg said as much when he annoyingly declared that people no longer have multiple lives (like separate work life, social life, family life…) and if they do they are disingenuous. danah boyd (and myself) attacked that one. Easy to say we all have one life for a white, straight, Ivy League, rich guy. I digress.

For better or worse, Facebook is arguably the only place in our lives where our work friends, school friends, friend-friends, party friends, summer camp friends, parent’s friend’s friends, merge. It is also the principal platform for users to share sentiment, feelings and personal artifacts with one another and, oftentimes, share these personal relics to a vast and invisible audience. For 99% of your Facebook actions there are “friends” who are bearing witness. You are not left alone there. And so when we die it seems to have become the principal social networking site that mourners may think of less of as a social networking site and more as an invisible portal to the actual person. This, a unique social web 2.0 quirk, is both interesting and confusing.

I have Facebook friends who have died and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing how their Facebook profiles suddenly transform into an interactive mausoleum where users are able to share sentiment on their wall and comfort one another. These pages live on. Unlike other social networking sites that don’t allow this. That freeze in time, with the person’s last tweet, last blog update, static and alone and moving further and further away from us in time. This isn’t reassuring to go back to, when we miss our friend who is gone. These sites that just remind us of the time between when he was here, and when he was not.

I feel like I have seen a disproportionate amount of death this hot and muggy summer and I am trying to consider these experiences in the lens of how Facebook has become a socially appropriate place to mourn and grieve.

In the 1960’s Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross posited sequential stages of grief which included, “denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.” Otherwise known as the grief-cycle. I wonder if it’s primarily those who deny or those who have accepted who find comfort in messaging the deceased on their Facebook walls? I wonder if and how it may feel like a different act to the mourner to write a letter to the deceased person as opposed to posting a message on their Facebook wall?

When we post, we are posting publicly, people are bearing witness to our sentiments. But these “witnesses” are mostly an invisible audience and it’s difficult for users to realize the scope of all possible viewers. But they know it’s not private. What comfort does the invisible witnesses provide?

Standing around in all this black one warm grey day someone recently told me that we have no control over our lives. That it is life’s biggest illusion. That it’s an illusion that we think we have the ability to create control in routine, in relationships, in being good. That something happens suddenly—someone dies suddenly—and it feels a page of a book was just ripped out of our life. Or many, many pages.

It is curious what unique space Facebook is allowing mourners. It is curious to consider how people are seeing Facebook, not as code, not as somebody else’s social media platform, not as a place where web aggregators crawl and keywords ping, not as somebody else’s business, but just as a person they very much miss. It is remarkable, really, how closely people have allowed this platform to penetrate their lives, how much people  ignore it–Facebook–to instead only see what and who they want to see. In the way that controlling our lives is one big, great illusion, so quite similarly is Facebook.

When my mom warns me not to “put everything out there,” on my Facebook account I think like, Mom, who do you think is looking? I want to say, Mom, I’d be thrilled if someone was looking. Like if some old perv was looking at the pictures of that time when Tif and I went to memorial pool. The pictures of us in our two pieces on the towels painting our toenails that Tif took and then posted on Facebook so fast, I hadn’t even gotten home and logged onto my computer by the time they were up. Why is the idea of that so bad? If there was some perv looking at my pictures and he messaged me to say so and wanted to talk, I’d probably message back. I wouldn’t like meet him in his van but I’d chat if he cared enough to try to talk to me. Shock me, shock me, Mom.

Our health teacher, Mrs. Krasner, is weird. In the fall, she made a big thing to our class. That we were 9th graders, the newbies in highschool, and she was going to be our friend all the way through. She said she’d support us. If we needed help we could always come to her classroom. She pointed to the gay triangle sticker on the classroom door and said how that means this is a safe place. The black boys who play football snickered in the back. Mrs. Krasner gave them a look but didn’t say anything because you could tell she was nervous. Black boys = 1 point. I wanted to look back and smile at them but I was nervous too—school had just started and I wasn’t sure who to align myself with so I didn’t do anything and stayed invisible.

Anyways, a few weeks later Mrs. Krasner told us about blow jobs. She said she loved giving her husband blow jobs and I thought that was disgusting and inappropriate.  So I told my mom. She said Jesus Christ. Then Mrs. Krasner said how when she gives her husband a blow job she always uses a condom.

“That’s nasty!” a bad girl hollered from the back. Everyone laughed. Mrs. Krasner sat on the top of desk, crossed her legs, folded her hands and put them on her knees leaned forward and said, “No Kim, what’s nasty is getting gray-colored genital warts all over your mouth.” TMI means Too Much Information and that was total TMI. “Dang,” the girl whispered leaning back in her seat. Mrs. Krasner = 1 point. I was snapping at my Silly bracelets and pretending to be aloof because that’s what I do, but I was listening. I’m actually always listening. Little known fact.

I haven’t given a blow job yet. I would, I’m not morally opposed. But I have no one to give a blow job to. I would if there was somebody, because I just want to get it over with and make sure I can do it without gagging. The longer I don’t do it, the more nervous I get about when I’ll have to do it. Tif said I shouldn’t worry about gagging, that it’s easy. Tif’s doing something. She told me not to tell anyone.

This is what Tif is doing. She is giving this guy Max, who is a junior and is on the basketball team, blow jobs at night in his car when he picks her up. She tells her mom she is getting frozen yogurt but they park near the water plant and she does it. Tif said they also have really good conversations. He tells her how much he hates his girlfriend, that she is prude and is stupid, but that she just makes sense because she’s part of his group and that his dad really likes her. He can’t stand his dad either, that’s another thing. He says his dad is really mean and is obsessed with Max being perfect. Good grades, varsity teams, the wifey girlfriend, that whole thing.

“I don’t know if I buy that,” I told Tif and she looked at me like I was a backstabbing bitch and goes, “Buy what?” And I realized she thought I meant I was suspicious of her relationship with Max, but I meant that I didn’t buy how bad his dad was. “Oh no,” Tif said looking at me normal again when she realized what I was talking about, “his dad sounds terrible.”

I guess this sounded like a bad thing Tif was doing. That was my first thought. We are pretty hammered home with the respect yourself bit, so that was the first alarm that went off in my head. But I knew if I said anything Tif would get angry at me. I also could tell she was proud—really proud. This annoyed me, but I didn’t let on to it.

I thought about what Max looked like; he’s tall with brown hair and doesn’t have acne. He’s not in the coolest group for the juniors but he is in the second tier of cool groups—which is not nothing. I never thought Tif was prettier than me, I thought we were at the same level, but I guess she is. This also annoyed me.

“So you’re a mistress?” I said. We were eating Starbursts on my bed. Tif likes to flatten them out with her hands like they’re dough and then push different flavors on top, she calls it a Starburst sandwich. I think it’s disgusting- I let her know that but she just laughs and swears she has washed her hands.

Tif thought the mistress thing was funny and laughed. I was sort of jealous. But I was also a little pissed off. And another part of me felt sad for Tif because no matter what Tif says, being Max’s girlfriend is better than being his secret blow job girl. I felt these three emotions all at once: jealous, pissed and sad. I know outside I had to play it cool. Pretend it wasn’t a thing, that I didn’t care. So that’s what I did while my mind ran wild. Story of my life.

Now that I think about it, I really shouldn’t have been that surprised. I should have seen this coming. Tif and I have been best friends since the 5th grade. Every year towards the end of August we do the same thing, figure out who we’re going to be that year. We look through designer websites and celebrity sites and we watch movies where there are cool girls, that sort of thing, and we figure it out.  It actually takes a really long time. I mean like, weeks. But it’s important to do before September when our moms take us back to school shopping so we get the right kind of clothes to be the right kind of person.

You have to realize something, this is the part I really don’t think adults comprehend, that every single thing we put on our bodies is deliberate. Every single thing. It’s exhausting. I mean, if my nail polish looks like it is partially scratched off, it’s not because I’ve been wearing it for a long time it’s because I put it on and then partially scratched it off to look like I don’t care. It sounds stupid writing it out now but it’s true for me and I know it’s true for Tif and I’d bet it’s true for 95% of the girls in our class. And the other 5% are the girls who are completely clueless and obsessed with science and math or have anger problems or whatever.

For this year, and it was an important one because it was our first year in high school, Tif wanted to be Fuck It Girl. Tif’s more extreme than I am and when she said that I just cringed and laughed. I knew what she meant but it sounded ridiculous coming out of her mouth. She said Fuck It Girl is hot, but she doesn’t care that she is hot, and boys like her but she doesn’t care that boys like her.

“Then what is she? You’re saying that she is not anything.”

Tif chewed on that one and said Fuck It Girl has bigger problems than that kind of stupid stuff.

We agreed that Fuck It Girl would wear skinny jeans that had a rip under her ass. Not so you saw her underwear because Fuck It Girl wears thongs but so you saw a slit of her thigh if she bent over.

So yeah, I get it. Fuck It Girl would give secret blow jobs and not care about it. That’s the sort of girl Fuck It Girl is. I get it. Tif went all the way with this. Gold star Tif.

I was more confused than Tif this year because I wanted to be seen as hot but I didn’t want to be slutty. I wanted to be the sort of girl a boy would notice but he would think he is the only one who notices because I am different and special. And then he would like me more for it.

“Retards are different and special,” Tif said.

“No, I want to be like a book only some people understand.”

“That’s tricky,” she said. It was and we thought about it.

“The girl next store?” She said.

“No, they are too prude and quiet.”

“If it talks like a duck.” I threw my balled up sweatshirt at her.

“I am The Great Gasby,” I announced. I hadn’t even read The Great Gasby, but I had a good feeling about it. The Great Gasby would wear a lot of dresses we deducted. And every once in a while she’d lace a ribbon through her braid.

“The Great Gasby would wear white slip-on KEDS!” Tif almost yelled, as if it were a math problem she finally solved correctly.

Part of me thinks the cooler you are the more secrets you have. Because if you don’t have secrets it’s like nothing has happened to you. It’s like no one has bothered to make something happen to you because you aren’t pretty enough or you aren’t cool enough or you aren’t interesting enough.

People tell me their secrets all the time. It’s weird. Teachers even. I’ll be in a classroom after school to go over why I got a C on a math test and all of a sudden Mr. Leffer, the Algebra teacher, will go into this whole tangent about how difficult it is to really teach all 27 of us in the class specific variables because we all learn differently and sometimes he wonders if he is even getting through to any of us and how he thinks about going into the Peace Corps in Ethiopia or some other poor place where he can really be of service because honestly, he sighs, “I’m not even sure that I’m doing this job very well.”

I swear. And I just sit there like, you’re on crack why are you telling me this? I mean I don’t say that, I nod along and then shrug my shoulders at the end like I’m agreeing with him, like I’m saying, Tough lot out there man. And then I tell my mom and Tif. And it’s not just that time; people do this to me all the time. Just load their shit on me like I know something.

“You’re someone people can confide in,” Tif says like she is older than me.

Like a blank journal. Like an empty room. I think, annoyed.

I have one secret though. A secret that has happened to me– is happening to me. This is different than secrets people tell you about themselves, those don’t count. My secret is sort of embarrassing but whatever, here it is– I talk to this guy online at night and nobody knows. We met in real life once though at my friend Susan’s birthday pool party in September right after 9th grade started. His name is Jeff and he is Susan’s cousin’s friend, he lives in a town that is like 45 minutes away or something. We all Facebook friended each other after the party because that’s what you do and then a week later he suddenly Facebook chatted me, “What’s up girl?” I liked that he called me girl, I noted that part in my journal. Nobody calls me girl and it made me feel pretty or special or something.

Anyways. Now we talk on the computer almost every night. Sometimes we don’t, but most nights we do. It’s like, this is embarrassing, but it’s becoming the thing I look forward to during the day. Which seems sort of pathetic because he doesn’t see me and no one really knows he exists in my life and it’s not like he’s my boyfriend or we talk about anything gross or sexual. We’re friends, I think. But his friendship seems more important to me than a lot of friends I see every day at school. I like that I can sit there in my bedroom with my retainer in and hair scunchy, which I think is more comfortable than hair elastics but if I wore a scrunchy to school I’d be made fun of the second I walked through the door. I like that I can tell Jeff what I’m thinking and he tells me what he is thinking. About his family and friends, and how he feels like he is different. How he feels like he doesn’t fit in. That it’s like all his friends are content and happy with everything, going to basement parties on the weekends and hanging out at the tennis courts after school, but he feels like there is so much more out there. That everyone in his town are really sheltered and confined but nobody except him realizes it or cares.

The more he tells me the more I feel like, sort of like Jeff is articulating exactly how I’ve always felt. Like before I was too stupid to realize it myself but yeah, duh, I feel the exact same way! That’s why everything is so exhausting and confusing. That’s why I over think every single thing. That’s not normal, right? I mean I really think about every single detail to every single thing. How boys look at me, how girls talk to me. What everyone is wearing. What everyone is eating. It’s like, I feel like I’m trying really, really hard to figure out how everyone around me works. How they talk and eat and dress and feel things, like what makes them happy and sad and excited and depressed and I just copy it all. Because none of it feels natural. I’m just like, pretending.

I didn’t realize any of this until I started talking with Jeff online. And he totally agrees with me.

“We’re two chameleons lying against a rock, so we look like the rock,” Jeff said one night, “but we aren’t the rock.”

I wrote that in my journal, too.

If your eyes are supposed to be the windows to your soul then Tif is building some pretty heavy shudders over those windows. She keeps applying black liquid eye liner, like every free second she’s got. I told her once that I didn’t think she was doing her eyes any favors and she just said I don’t know what it’s like. She told me how everything is getting really intense. How much life sucks.

I want to shake her and be like, Tif, you’re not really Fuck It Girl, that was just our, our, well I’m totally sure what you’d call what Fuck It Girl was, but it was never real. I know that. You can’t pick who you are, can you? It just like, happens.

I want to tell Tif that all of her problems she has made for herself. They aren’t real. She could just stop being Max’s secret blow job girl. She could just stop sneaking out of my house when she sleeps over on Saturdays to meet Max and then come back at two in the morning through the back door we had unlocked when my parents went to sleep. It’s annoying. Tif’s annoying and has no perspective. And I think it’s gross what she’s doing with Max, I do.

I was telling this to Jeff one night. And he was saying how he feels like he knows a million “Tif’s” at his school, “But you know what?” he said, “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

I think that was 100% the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. When I read that I felt like happiness was a thing, and that thing was shooting through my body. And I wish I could have trapped it in and put it in my jewelry box so I could open it up and feel that way again. Because then Jeff said the next thing. He told me he has been talking to this guy online that he met on MySpace. And he was thinking of meeting him at this concert that was in the city. Then Jeff told me he was pretty certain he was gay.

And it’s fine, it’s fine Jeff’s gay because it’s not like, I mean like I said we weren’t doing anything sexual. He’s not like my boyfriend. It was never like that. It was just special. But the thing is I’m not gay. And that’s the part that is confusing me. So great, Jeff’s gay. He’s officially different then everybody. He officially has a reason to not fit in. Everyone gets it. But what about me? That’s the part that feels weird to think about. Why can’t I have a reason to feel like I don’t fit in? A reason everybody understands. It’s not like I can talk to Jeff about this because I sound like a total nutbag. And Tif is so annoying she wouldn’t even listen to me or she’d say something crass and stupid like I’m a faghag. And my mom wouldn’t understand.

9th grade is officially the most confusing year ever. And what’s even more disgusting is that I still haven’t read The Great Gabsy yet. I still don’t even know who I’m pretending to be. On weekends I sleep until 11am and when I come downstairs all groggy-eyed my mom looks at me like I’m on crack. But I swear, this is another thing nobody understands, this—whatever all “this” is—it’s really, really exhausting.