MANILA, Philippines—The day that all your friends, past lovers, former bosses, college classmates, Brazilian models, and natty acquaintances each start referring to themselves in the third person, you know that the world has gone slightly askew.
Oh wait, that has already happened.
Ever since this cyber phenomenon called Facebook converted millions of people all over the world to its enterprise of minding everyone else’s business, it has spawned a new virtual culture bordering on absurdity. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that a big chunk of the human race had suddenly contracted a mild form of dementia by engaging in newfangled methods of social interaction.
No longer content with just saying hello, you can now “poke” or even “superpoke” a friend by throwing virtual sheep, trout, the kitchen sink or even Barrack Obama at them. You can also show your affection by sending cyber booze, aquarium fish, lacy thongs, and lil’ green patches that ensure you a piece of land in that Otherworld called the worldwide web.
Yet beyond such bizarre new developments in socializing and flirting, Facebook has explored other dimensions of virtual vanity through its myriad applications. Struggling for self-definition? Take a quiz! And blimey, there are heaps of them. What color are you? What city are you? What kind of drunk are you? What Transformer are you? What “Sex and the City” character are you? What “Gossip Girl” character are you? What drug are you? What serial killer are you?
Therein lies the appeal of Facebook—it has the power to make you feel cooler, or at least more interesting, than you really are. Now if I believed any of those quizzes, I am a green magic mushroom by the name of Optimus Prime, Waldorf by day and Herbert Mullin, the delusional hippie serial killer by night with an address in Paris. Wow, my mother was right all this time—I really am special!
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
The novelty of these applications may fade some day, but if I may so boldly predict the one thing that would keep the network alive are the Status reports. What are they? Every person with a Facebook account has the right to declare, in one succinct sentence, what his state is at the fleeting present. Facebook then collates all these status messages on a page you can easily access with a click.
I admit, the first time I encountered this little status update concept, my spleen started hurting from such lameness. I mean, isn’t everybody pretty much doing the same thing at that moment of writing one’s status—surfing the Net? It became ridiculous less than a year ago in one of those chi chi cocktails celebrating the opening of a boutique hotel, when some guests espied a computer terminal on the ground floor. They rushed to it and logged on to change their present state of affairs: “(So-and-so) is partying hard!” “(Such-and-such) is enjoying her margaritas at sunset!” Hmm.
I was baffled by this overriding need to define the living moment. Even if it meant actually having to put that moment in the real world on hold to uplift one’s identity in the digital multiverse. (Plus, I could have sworn that it was a virgin daiquiri, and not a margarita she was holding!)
Then one day, I joined the bandwagon of status freaks. It all started, I believe, with a line that came to me while I was working late one night. I thought, dammit I am working too hard for peanuts. I am working hard for the “mani!”
A pause. I realized that it was way too good a line to leave hanging on the ephemeral fringes of thought, or wasted on a diary page no one would read. So I thought of writing that down as my status message on my Facebook page. “Natalia is working hard for the mani.” And there, dearly beloved, was no turning back.
Status Anxiety
I still don’t make it a daily habit to check up on my network’s status reports (because it’s just way too time-consuming, plus certain people still can’t get the concept of conjugating in the third person), but on those days I do browse the one-liners of my contacts, I start getting the feeling that I’m on to some daily soap opera. It’s practically the Holy Grail of the gossipmonger.
The status assaults run the gamut of emotions. They range from cryptic messages, witticisms, declarations of love, heartbreak, global conquests, to some pretty retarded assertions. Though it’s just a peek of who a person truly is, the status lines are mini revelations of personalities: you know who among the lot are fun, mopey, smart, philosophical, creative, boring and downright pathetic. Which is why for some people, like a good friend of mine confessed, writing down one’s status in that small corner of cyberspace can oft be thought-consuming. “I’m so pressured to write down something cool,” he said, “just to stand out from everyone else.”
How true that is. For in this hyperfast world, there are still a few things unchanged from our self-fragmented high school days. And that is the desire to be accepted in the caste system of cool. Yes, even in the virtual social ladder, where you’re about as real as the electronic sheep in an android’s dream.
