Facing the Face in Your Own Place - facebook

By TRB

Are we to believe that facebook, the free world's most popular social networking site is somehow responsible for the fall of the Egyptian government? Because we can believe it if we want. A message posted on facebook about the murder of an innocent man by Mubarak's ghoulish police seemed to catalyze things for a lot of Egyptian people. And many of them went right to their facebook "friends," and before you knew it hundreds of thousands of so called "friends" who, in many cases, had met only on facebook were lighting massive bonfires outside the presidential palace and demanding the that the Grand Ghoul step down.

The power of facebook? Partly, I guess. Facebook does hold a certain kind of power over its user's lives, at least in the way they spend their time. And it is a most unusual phenomenon. It is only a bit of computer programming. But then you go to it on line and you enter and the ghosts in the machine check you in as they would at a hotel. Now you are in the hotel. Everyone has their own room and they are writing their thoughts on the walls and "befriending" people they will never meet in their lives, playing a little music and generally hanging out having a good time.

Suddenly this airless, windowless, roofless thing called facebook is a space. And if you have a heightened spatial awareness it can be quite troubling. Is there an upstairs here? Sometimes it seems there is. How about a corridor leading from one room to another? After a while it seems like that's the case. A downstairs then? Yes, one of those too. And there are constantly people at your door wanting to get on your "site", which, in your mind is growing too fast. People are going to fall out of the windows if it continues at this rate.

But there are no windows.

These portraits of new people who are always besieging your site bring information with them. They tell you that you have say, 11 mutual friends, but then again, none of your friends on facebook are at all like your real friends off facebook. Facebook friends are very lazy; can't drive you to the airport. Can't feed your cat for a week. In most cases, can't even come over with some sugar when you run out.

And yet, if you befriend the right people with just the right combination of eccentricities, your vaporous friends on facebook are suddenly transformed into the friends you always wanted to have or the much-missed friends from your past. Suddenly they have come home and you can say almost anything to them. You have this false sense of intimacy. Or is it simply a new kind of intimacy? Some of your facebook friends can become very important to you. You bounce ideas off them, career opportunities; you need to know their opinion.

Have you gone to far? Seriously, you are not in a hotel room, you are in your own room - and none of these "friends" are really in the room, nor do they really know anything about you, except what you tell them.

So, facebook is a fake place that relies on some obscure cognitive spatial neurons before you can turn it into the Chelsea Hotel in the Village circa. 1969, or a Holiday Inn where you simply want to talk to your friend before you go home, where of course you already are. Or maybe it is just a giant, not very well-tended Victorian mansion containing all your former hippie friends from the past and the newer version of the same anti-establishment, all around, "so who's got the weed" guy. Yes you have to have one of them if you want to re-create the past.

Who said you couldn't go back? You can on facebook with a few simple key strokes, you are there. Or you can go forward. This facebook thing is not a static scene like some computer game. It is a "place." And it is pretty safe to say that more people in the Western world have been there than any other single place in reality.

You usually get your doses of reality from some other location in your brain. The phone rings while you are chatting with someone who you would like to be your first fake girlfriend. It's a disembodied voice from the other dimension, the so-called "real" one. He is saying you overslept, you are on deadline. You spent too much time in the other dimension last night, the dimension that sits in your lap.

So let's just get into a slightly different subject here without having to go through all the writing it would normally take to pull that off. See, the hippie in me is coming back. It is facebook.

Let's go back to Egypt and to Peter Tohnshend (why?), who wrote the lyrics for a song called "Face the Face," which appeared on a solo effort in 1990 called "White City (a novel)." I wasn't going to purchase it but I did and it was great. David Gilmour helped him with it, particularly on the title track, which was about the awful housing projects in which Peter grew up. The title pissed me off at the time. A novel? Would his next solo album be a microwave oven? And I was also a little prejudiced.I was writing about the Rock scene back then, and Pete's band mates were thinking he was saving his best songs for his solo efforts. But I have gotten off track here.

Let's go to the second most important song on that album, "Face the Face," which seemed to be about a social uprising. Some of the lyrics: "Study the pix/Watch the flix/fool the fools/plan the plans/fight the fight/light the light/judge the judge/line the lines. . ."

I was quite taken aback by Face the Face, when I heard it again recently, and what I saw as Peter's prophecy about the uprising in Egypt and the songs name Face the Face - and facebook. No, of course not. It couldn't be. Peter is probably trolling the internet as I write this.

But a friend calls and says it looks like they are building an outside holding pen or prision for humans over at the Otis Air Force base, which is owned by we the people. He says there are guard towers. And an extremely high fence with three layers of barbed wire. Maybe I will do a story on it. Things in that dimension are starting to get under my skin.

Someone else, a "friend" on facebook had said something about the Wisconsin labor demonstrations and might they turn into another Egypt. I imagined her putting on her mittens as she was saying this, She has healthy red cheeks and is very beautiful. And I am thinking, are all of us facebook friends going to meet inside a fenced-in area someday?

Because it can be difficult to social network your way out of a fenced in area.