Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Facebook recently surpassed 500 million users. Exactly what percentage of that number really “use” Facebook on a daily or even weekly basis is unknown, but it’s an impressive feat any way you slice it, especially for a site that started as one man’s personal burn book in 2003. I’ve always been wary of Facebook, as I am wary of any website that uses the sentence “Tell me everything about yourself!” as a business model. As Facebook has grown—or exploded, really—over the last seven years, so has my unease. It’s a gut feeling, a free-floating discomfort that’s hard to put into words, though I have often tried.

At first the words were, I don’t like that Facebook is centralizing all things “social” on the internet. I correspond with friends, get invited to parties, receive reminders from my book club, look at photo albums, and experience a million other tiny social interactions, all through Facebook’s tidy little pages. That we would so willingly allow our social interactions to be centralized, commoditized, and controlled seems like something out of Orwell, or better, Huxley, as we unwittingly sacrifice freedom so that we can amuse ourselves to death. Isn’t it unsettling that a single company could have so much control over such an important aspect of our lives?

Well, not really. Sure, Facebook controls the social (Microsoft must be kicking itself), but NSTAR controls my electricity and gas. A couple of food conglomerates produce most of the chicken I’ll ever eat. An organization I can’t even name provides me with clean, fluorinated water. I get my water from them, and I don’t even know who they are. All sorts of important, even essential, things are run through centralized agencies, be they private companies or federal organizations. Facebook is just a new kind of utility, and while your social life might take a slight ding without an account, you certainly don’t need one to have a life.

Since there’s nothing wrong with Facebook centralizing the social, my unease had to take a new form. I don’t like that Facebook is rapidly spreading its tendrils across the internet, integrating itself with every website and web service I encounter. On the surface of it, that’s scary, but only because I’m using a word like tendrils. The spread of Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like” buttons really represents two things. First, this is just another example of Facebook trying to centralize all social activity on the web, which we’ve now established is not that big a deal. Second, and more importantly, I am for all intents and purposes eternally signed in to Facebook, even when I’m nowhere near Facebook.com. My unease stems from the idea that my Facebook identity—which is my real identity, let’s remember—now persists across spaces where I would have previously been anonymous. So it’s the loss of anonymity that bothers me.

But why should it? Internet anonymity exists (or perhaps, existed) because the internet is so young. In the beginning, there were few persistent databases, no rules, and identity was malleable. You could pack up your digital identity and vanish without a trace, and, if you so chose, you could come back as someone else entirely. The power to remake yourself however you saw fit was thrilling, intoxicating, and wondrous, but anonymity isn’t without its drawbacks and dangers. For that matter, why should I assume that I have any right to anonymity in the first place? No less than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently stated that if you want to participate in society, you can’t do so anonymously. As the internet becomes essential to our society, the ability to remain anonymous on it becomes increasingly difficult, and even counterproductive. Facebook is just the most visible manifestation of this inevitable transition.

So if I’m at peace with Facebook’s utilitarian control of my social life and the inevitable destruction of anonymity on the web, why the anxiety? I suppose it boils down to this. Facebook’s users volunteer an absolutely insane amount of information about themselves. In an average profile you might encounter: my name, my address, my phone number, my IM, my mother, my father, my siblings, my school, my college, my employer, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m watching, what I’m reading, what I like, what I hate, where I was, where I am, where I’m going, who I’m dating, how I’m voting, and photographic evidence to corroborate any and all of this.

Half a billion people now have access to a system that can chronicle their lives in the most minute detail, the sort of living timeline that used to be the privilege of royalty, historical giants, and madmen. Twenty years from now I might be able to scroll back through Facebook and see a snapshot of who I was at this moment, captured not just in photographs, but in things I wrote, thoughts I shared, and conversations I had. On the one hand, it’s a modern miracle.

On the other hand, it’s a stalker’s dream, or put another way, a nightmare. What bothers me most about Facebook is that millions of people are offering up an unprecedented volume of deeply personal data to a private company with absolutely no oversight. Facebook can do whatever it wants with this data. It has no mandate to product your privacy, and clearly does not care to. Innumerable details of my life in the hands of a private corporation? How is that not a nightmare?

What bothers me second-most about Facebook is the stultifying sameness of it all. I suppose this isn’t a problem for most people, but let me provide an example. This summer, eight of my closest friends and I took a trip up to Maine. It was a wonderful weekend. Magical, even. I have pictures to prove it, but I don’t want to put them on Facebook. It’s not that there’s anything on the camera that I wouldn’t want made public, on the contrary, the weekend was remarkably wholesome (almost Mormon, excepting the Lovecraft and all the drinking). Putting these images on Facebook simply would not do them justice. That wasn’t just another weekend, and I can’t stand to see it become just another album.

My fear of Facebook, then, is that we’ll put all of ourselves into it, and get a mere fraction of that back.