Sorry, I just can’t let go of this personal obsession of mine…
Eleanor Roosevelt once stated:
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Surely there is many horrible things to say about facebook. Especially in this season for company christmas dinners, where not only your colleagues and boss will be able to see the forever captured image of you dancing on the bar table wearing nothing but a hula skirt and whipped cream to cover your last shred of dignity. It will also be accessible to your friends. That’s not the biggest problem, they know about your inclinations… They’ve seen worse anyway.
But if your facebook friendlist contains more than just your friends and colleagues, you are by now royally screwed. Because your image (or maybe it was a video with a decent sound quality of you singing “my boney is over the ocean” to go with the dance) is also accessible to your mother, your nephew, perhaps your own kids as well. Maybe even your kids friends parents, which means it could be all over your local community within just a few hours…
It takes balls to have a facebook profile!
In fact, it takes balls to show the world who you really are. That is the really scary part, the part that makes so many people use facebook in the exact opposite way. It is still possible (yet!) to stage yourself on facebook. You have to think carefully about the images you upload, the notes you write and your status updates, of course, but with an extensive amount of energy, you will be able to pull it off. Besides, we all stage ourselves on some level all of the time, right?
In this hyper complex society, where I wear different masks, play different roles or put on different hats, I still have one core called “me”. I am a mother, I am a student, I am a friend, I have hobbies, I have passions and beliefs. These different roles I play serve a purpose. They allow me to adjust myself to the different subsystems I walk in and out of every day. The core is still ‘me’, but what else ‘me’ might contain is not obvious to the system I walk into. My “mother role” is as obvious to my teacher as my “student role” is to the other parents of my kids friends.
Showing one role at a time serves a purpose. When you only get to talk to people within a particular subsystem for about 4 minutes a day, you boil yourself down to the essence, the part that is relevant for the system to know about. So when I step into the kindergarden to pick up my son, it is highly irrelevant for the kindergarden to know, that I had a great conversation today with a classmate, or that my latest portrait or blog post went right into the bin. What they need to know about, is my role as a mother of my children.
Walking through all the subsystems everyday can be quite draining. Playing a role is always draining, because the free expression is moderated, and the moderation itself demands a lot of energy. (…Where was I going with this? )
Facebook allows me to show all of my roles at once, if I allow myself, that is. And that is where the true horror comes in, because man’s greatest fear is the fear of rejection. What if the colleague noticed you weren’t really sick the other day? What if your christmas dinner video went public? What if people could really see who you really are?
THAT is scary!
But it doesn’t have to be avoided anyway. It seems as if the more human we show ourselves to be, the more we are liked by others. I believe it is this search for authenticity, we crave for something real, something in the opposite direction of the glamour and glitter of the women’s magazines. And we can render this authenticity simply by saying: “Yes, that was me in that video – doesn’t that hula skirt make me look slim?”
It doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to upload images of my dirty dishes so that everyone can see that I haven’t done them in two days. (But of course, the writing about it is an attempt of rendering authenticity. Tell me if it works…) Because not having done the dishes may not be something I am proud of either. And so showing a picture of it might give the impression, that I am, which wouldn’t be an authentic representation of who I am.
My point is this; We are all humans. And we all have something we would rather not show others, simply out of fear of being “rejected”. Even if these roles we play are authentic, they are still just a necessary representation of the whole. By uniting these roles and to dare not staging oneself too much on facebook, it is possible to render a greater authenticity both within oneself and in others.
And THAT is why I am so obsessed with facebook!