I Am Watching Your Life Unravel On Facebook, by Brian Oliu

I have just changed my status to let you know that I am writing this article (this is my first article! Hello!) because I have not changed my status since last night when I was sad and I wrote something vague and what I considered to be extremely revealing, which, in actuality, was not extremely revealing, and was, in fact, vague.

This is the danger of the permanent instant.  It used to be that when you were at home doing work, eating a White Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and being bludgeoned by the inevitable sense of ennui that occurs when watching television alone, you brushed your teeth and went to bed, you big baby, because tomorrow is another day.  And you know what?  You probably got a decent night’s sleep and you woke up feeling pretty good about yourself.

However, we live in the age of sonar.   Send a vaguely melancholic shot out into the world next to your first and last name—there is no doubt it is you—and hope that someone else will receive said call and return serve, preferably immediately upon reception in order to provide some sort of end-of-day validation.  Now there is a footprint of your feelings and your reaction to those feelings; quite often we wake up the following day and see what we wrote while emotionally occupied (yes this can mean drunk) and are sometimes reminded of our feelings at that moment—some days we laugh it off, other days we revisit the body that we have created for ourselves a few hours (and a hot shower) earlier.

It’s like the social experiment game we used to play in high school with our friends:

1.  Make a show of being left alone.
2.  People ask if you are alright.
3.  Tell them you want to be left alone.
4.  Be bitter that they have left you alone.

Replace the 40oz of Mountain Dew with 12 oz of vodka and add a technology more dangerous than AOL Instant Messenger or a Geocities website and kerplunk:  all the dolphins in the immediate sea (and the ocean where you went to college, and the ocean where your friends of the family reside—it is a strange ocean, lots of coral) are aware of your emotional plight, or at the very least, what sad bastard album you were listening to “6 hours ago”, and they will do the math to figure out that six hours ago was 4:30 in the morning your time, and they have already eaten breakfast and perhaps been on an early morning jog.

Social networking is different than regular networking because regular networking institutes some sort of guidebook defining how to successfully network.  Assuming that you are in the networking world of business or nets or working.  You must keep things ‘professional’—the pieces being networked are the only pieces available.  (Think USB cable, or you know, ports, which were very important back in the 1990s Internet.)  If I want to be published in your literary magazine, I will not tell you about my dead mother (she is not dead) and my flailing relationship with my soon-to-be sometimes lover.

But with recent articles vouching for the fact that your online superpresence is the real you, it somehow makes the new version of networking octopusian (octopilian?)—all sorts of squiggly lines popping forth from your body and your psyche and your penis like one of those universal charger things that you find in a SkyMall catalogue.  We must not lie about what we like lest we are quizzed about Fellini or someone gets the impression that the band we say we love ironically is not a band we love at all.

Do you not know about my photos?  Are you not familiar with the bands that I say I love?  Do you want to see if I like Fellini?  Do you not have a facebook account?  Do you want to know me better?  I will set up your facebook account for you!  It is easy.  This is how you add photos.  Oh, you commented on your own wall!  I know, it’s difficult!  I know that you are not good at the Internet!  This is how I post on your wall.  This is how I send you a message!  This is how I post a photo of us from a few months ago and this is how I tag it to demonstrate that there was a time that we took photographs together!  Isn’t this helping you a great deal?  I feel like we’ve really connected over the past couple of months.  You will buy me a soda and I will buy you a soda and I will write about how good a day I had and you will comment and I will comment back.  You will have a photograph that looks beautiful.  You will experiment with black and white.  You are easier to get in touch with.

You are now single.  You are now a body of water, a painting that you may or may not have drawn.  You are a celebrity that someone told you, once, you looked like.  You are ignoring the celebrity that you actually look like because they have a wonky face.  You are drunk.  You are hungover.  You don’t know where your dog is.

I am sorry that your life is ending, because, well, it is ending, but yes, I do care to comment on your bad day—sorry to hear you’re having a bad day hun –although I am already fully aware that work is terrible and you are not sleeping with the person that you think you should be sleeping with because the person you think that you should be sleeping with is not facebook active and that makes it more difficult to sleep with that person.  You should set up their facebook account for them!  It is easy.  This is how you add photos.  This is how you send a message.

And when it ends, it will be you who denies me.

One of the most spectacular things about the Internet at its inception was that everything was anonymous: we created avatars and screen names that represented who we were or who we desired to be (AwesomeGuy69420 was probably not awesome, good at mutual oral sex, a marijuana kingpin, or even a guy).  We were warned constantly about having our identities stolen and people finding out too much information about us—god forbid a last name or a hometown appeared on the Internet lest the hordes find you.  There was, of course, something exciting about this:  making up a fake name in a chatroom and telling people that you live in California (always California!  Where did the Californians say they were from?) and possessing information that someone wanted or desired.  I was from California.  I had a different birthday.  I played an instrument.

Now, of course, we know everything there is to know about everyone:  who their friends are, what they are doing at any given moment—there are even iPhone applications that will post to facebook or twitter the exact GPS location at that particular moment.  And the most frightening thing?  No one cares.

You have found an okay slice of pizza in the town that you now live.  No one will steal this.

I hear you are ordering a pizza.  I am going to steal your identity using key notes I have acquired from your online presence, and commandeering the mental states that I have observed in your updates.  I do not need to know what your password is because your password is not my name.  The person delivering the pizza will not know the difference.