"Your face, my thane, is as a book"

One evening nearly two months ago I was reading Wendell Berry. This in itself is unsurprising—Berry is one of my favorite authors, one of those who can clearly articulate what the jumbled fog of my thoughts can only begin to hint at. On this particular evening I came to his essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” in his book “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry” and was especially struck by this paragraph.

“But a computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can’t get from other humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more….Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily, and too much. I would like to be a better writer, and for that I need help from other humans, not a machine.”

My initial impulse was to vow to write only with pen and paper, and to forgo the supposed advantages of the computer. As I sit here typing this on my new netbook that I bought just a few weeks ago, I readily concede that this did not happen, and that I am unlikely to give up computers entirely any time soon.

But this did get me thinking about the way I use computers, specifically how I use the rampant social networking tool known as facebook. Indeed, the quote above could be referring to facebook. On the main facebook page is a tagline: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Facebook enables more, faster, and easier communication with your friends. But I believe that it does not, and cannot, lead to deeper, better friendships. No machine can do that.

I had been having qualms about facebook for some time. When I first left school, it was hard for me when I logged on and saw photos of my friends having fun without me. I felt forgotten and left out, though I knew of course that it was not intentional and that I was partly to blame for being so bad at communicating with anyone I don’t see regularly. I did not like that through facebook I could pretend to be staying in touch with people, when in reality we did not directly interact at all. Facebook creates a false closeness that can be harmful when you realize how shallow those relationships really are. I have always been leery of how different people can appear in their online persona simply by what information they put in their profile and how they choose to present themselves, and I became frightened when I found myself doing the same thing. A foolish amount of my self-worth was tied up with facebook, with who commented on what I posted, who wrote on my wall. I find wall-to-wall communication to be stilted and odd, because the writer knows that everyone can see it. I would freak out every time I had a message, wondering what someone had to say to me that they didn’t want everyone to know. Beyond all this, facebook was distracting, the link I clicked on every time I was struggling over a sentence I was writing, the automatic response to the first twinges of boredom. As a good friend of mine once put it, “I always expect something great will happen in my life if I go on facebook.”

A paragraph a few pages later in Berry’s essay spurred me into action:

“It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have—a pencil, say—why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging?...If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something complicated?”

That phrase, “the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily,” stayed with me for days. I decided to draw the line, and stop solving a problem I didn’t have. I deleted my facebook profile.

Did you know that when you delete your account they throw up photos of five of your friends with the caption “____will miss you!” This is less effective when they choose someone you don’t like and haven’t spoken to in years, but unpleasantly manipulative nonetheless.

Being gone has been quite interesting. Frankly I’ve enjoyed being one of those weird people who doesn’t have facebook, one of those people you have to actually send an email to, or, God forbid, call on the telephone. My friends’ reactions have been fascinating, ranging from indignation and confusion to admiration. When I announced on facebook that I was leaving one friend wrote “but you know I’m terrible at communicating by phone!” To this I replied that we hadn’t interacted by facebook either in a long time. There facebook goes again, fooling us into thinking we are staying in touch.

I discovered that facebook was an even more important mode of communication than I ever realized; I do not have any other means of contacting a lot of my friends. I don’t even have my best friend’s email address. I realized that it’s a lot easier (but is it better?) to leave a note on someone’s wall than to find enough material to fill an entire email to them. I sent an email to a friend, proving that communication without facebook does still exist. She replied right away. It took me a month and a half to get back to her.

I’m sure I missed a lot of my friends’ birthdays, and I feel very bad about that. I almost missed saying “break a leg” to a good friend before she performed her senior theater show. I felt like the last cord between me and my former Goshen life had been cut, and found this both positive and negative. Without facebook I checked LiveJournal obsessively, and found myself searching for other things to check. People forgot I was not on facebook, and expected me to know things. I hardly had a single conversation with a friend that did not include the words “Did you see—oh wait, you’re not on facebook.” I was helping to plan a party and suddenly heard nothing for two days, only to learn that the conversation had continued via facebook message. They forgot. And I REALLY missed writing status updates.

However, being away from facebook did not help me to deepen my relationships with those around me—I did not immediately begin writing long letters with pen and ink to distant friends or have philosophical discussions with friends on the phone. Leaving facebook is not automatically the solution to better friendships. But I do believe that it is a step in the right direction, a step away from the illusion of being close with hundreds of people whose “add as a friend” button you have pushed.

Occasionally I wonder if I am over thinking this. Does facebook really merit this much thought and introspection? Why can’t I just be like all the other people my age, happily and thoughtlessly connecting with friends with the help of an electronic social networking tool? But then I hear about cyber bullying related suicide, and I realize that facebook is a big part of our lives, one that can influence feelings, thoughts and actions, and as such I believe we should look closely at it and examine it thoroughly. I want to be intentional and thoughtful about every aspect of my life. This includes how I use the internet. When I talked about my reasons for leaving with friends, a lot of them agreed that they had some half-hearted doubts, that facebook made them at least a little uncomfortable. Most people dismiss these doubts with a shrug—how bad can it really be?

All this said, I have decided to come back. This is almost as difficult a decision as leaving, and I can’t promise that I won’t leave again sometime. Significantly detracting from the immensity of my decision to leave is the fact that my profile was not entirely deleted, just deactivated. If I log back on my profile will be there, just the same as it was.

I am coming back for several reasons. I am usually the one with a camera at events. I have dozens of photo albums on facebook from the last five years of birthdays, Christmases, graduations and parties. All of these are simply gone for all my friends who may want to see them. Facebook is the premier mode of communication for people of my generation, and I at least want to keep track of what country my friends are in. Facebook is like cell phones—it is easy to live without one if everyone is living without one. But it is very hard to be the one person without one. I have proved to myself that I can live without facebook, and I don’t even feel like I’m missing anything important. But I have decided that I want to be a little more informed. I want to see the photos and silly videos that my friends post.

I am glad that I did this experiment. It made me and everyone I have talked to think about and evaluate how we use facebook. I am interested to see what going back will be like, whether I will slide right back in where I left off, or if things will change. I’m also interested to see if I decide to stay. I do not think that facebook itself is bad, but I think it is a good idea to look closely at how our lives intersect with the internet. I am glad that I removed the solution to the problem I didn’t have, and that I explored where I can and ought to draw the line in my life.