The people you meet on Facebook
My birthday was last week. By the end of the day, more than 350 people had sent me good wishes. I was told it was only good manners to respond to each and every one of them with a personal message. I guess I’m not that polite a person; I posted a general thank you to all my correspondents before I went to bed.
It is both gratifying and strange to experience such an outpouring of virtual affection; though I know how easy it is to post a greeting on someone’s time line, the truth is I only sometimes do it. While most of my friends are on Facebook, most of my Facebook “friends” are not people with whom I have a meaningful real-world relationship. We know each other through the Internet, through the posts we share and the comments we leave. I am surprised to be authentically touched by the little notes as they piled up on my timeline.
Like most thinking people, I’m inclined to be a little cynical about social media. I see its value: it allows my mother to keep up with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren no matter where they are in the world, it allows for the renewed acquaintance of lost friends, and I have discovered some terrifically interesting minds online. Yet most of the time, I think of Facebook as a kind of role-playing game where we all get to pretend to celebrity—a vanity channel through which we might all advertise ourselves.
I admit I use it for purposes of self-promotion. I post links to my columns and to my blood, dirt & angels blog. I’ve got a book coming out next year, and I plan on urging all my friends to buy a dozen copies or so. I’ve provided links where they can buy or stream my albums. While I feel kind of ridiculous talking about using social media as a way to grow my personal “brand” or whatever, I assume that anyone who has taken the trouble to hunt me down on Facebook is at least nominally interested in some of the things I do. So while I probably don’t exploit Facebook and Twitter to the extent that any self-styled social media guru would advise me to, I stay pretty active posting photos of my dogs.
I know what Facebook is, what it’s getting out of me (a lot of demographic information), and understand that it wants to try to send me stuff. But I’m not so deeply involved with the site that I worry about my posts reaching more of my friends and fans; Facebook is not part of my business model, but a kind of online scrapbook and meeting place. I post articles to Facebook because I want to hold onto them for a while. Lately I’ve been posting to Facebook sentences and paragraphs I’ve edited out of pieces I’ve written for publication. I may want to claim credit for them later. Like when I predicted the Cleveland Browns would win 10 games this year—with Brian Hoyer as their quarterback.
Most of what goes on my timeline is personal, but never too personal. I’m careful. I control who can see my posts, and what I post. I treat Facebook like a public square; I assume anyone could see what I’m doing at all times. I assume that hustlers and panhandlers will tell me all kinds of stories to try to get me to give them money. I assume some people will be unpleasant, and that some people will share more about themselves than I would like to overhear.
That’s part of the cost of doing business on the platform. I accept it, just as I accept that I might run into deceitful or boorish people in real life. As someone who is paid to express my point of view, I don’t mind engaging with critics and people very different from myself—that’s one of my favorite things to do—but I don’t scream at people online. If someone gets obnoxious I just do the online equivalent of walking away. I won’t “un-friend” you, but I will hide your posts.
None of what I’ve just said should be taken as advice. If you want to use social media, use it; if you want to avoid it, avoid it. If you want to become some blown-up online power user, bless your heart. Though I think I have a pretty clear idea of the limits of social media, and though I understand that the ultimate purpose of Facebook is to generate income for its shareholders, I’m pretty happy with the experience. It’s another way that human beings can connect.
And sometimes those connections can be profound.
I found out a few days ago that a man I’d known only through Facebook had died. I learned this because his wife posted a notice on his timeline to the effect that he had passed away in his sleep. “If you were his Facebook friend you were VERY special to him,” she wrote.
Though the town we live in often seems very small, I never met David Lindsay in real life. I always assumed I would, that we’d run into one another at the Literary Festival or a Travs game, shake hands and validate what was, despite its virtual nature, our authentic friendship.
Now that will never happen. But I can’t say I didn’t know him. While I might feel bad about having never met him in the real world, I’m grateful to have known him as I did. Over the past six or seven years, we’d had hundreds of conversations online. We’d traded comments and passed news items and essays back and forth. We discussed issues—David was a commonsensical fiscal conservative with a compassionate streak—and I doubt our ballots ever looked much alike. He was thoughtful and responsive; he didn’t try to score debate points by arguing semantics. He didn’t practice selective understanding. He was intellectually honest. He had a great sense of humor.
The last real exchange we had came the day after our most recent election. I was bored by all the political chatter that day and so I set out, on the blood, dirt & angels blog, to name an All-Arkansas team of major league baseball players (you can see that team at blooddirtandangels.com/index. php/2014/11/05/the-all-arkansasmajorI posted a link to the post, and after a while David responded with team of players from his home state of Alabama.
His team included Willie McCovey, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. Satchel Paige was their ace. While on any given afternoon, ours could beat theirs, any fair-minded person would concede that David’s was the better. It’s probably the best roster of any of the 50 states.
I’m conscious of the tendency for some columnists to take death as an occasion of death for facile musings, and I hope that’s not what I’m doing. David was a real presence in my life, though I only knew him as I did, as a ghost in my machine. I don’t know where he’s gone, I only feel his absence.
War Eagle, David Lindsay.