Victim of Culture

Facebook, Plato’s Cave, and why I feel normal

There was a time when I resisted the lure of Facebook.  I had already used MySpace and found it rather pointless.  It was mostly just old high school and college friends wanting to “reconnect” long enough to see how many kids I have, and not much else.  What was the point for a non-15-year-old?

Eventually, however, the lure of Facebook and the constant requests to “upgrade” to it from MySpace got me.  And what I found was pretty much exactly the same thing as MySpace.  Yes, the design is nicer, but the features and everything else reek of MySpace, which was pretty much a time sink and waste—though not necessarily always at the same time.

But then I discovered the true appeal of social networks—the normalizing factor.  Everyone knows the true use of social networks is voyeurism.  But as an adult the appeal of seeing a classmate in a drunken, provocative picture simply doesn’t exist.  But voyeurism remains for adults in the form of one constant high school reunion.

Remember Jane from high school?  Well, according to Facebook Jane now enjoys dressing up in 1920s attire to celebrate the rocking days of prohibition at church barbecues.  Wait, that isn’t normal!  I don’t do anything nearly that freaky.

But what about Paul from college?  Paul is so obsessed with Hayden Panettiere, the cheerleader from the TV show Heroes, that he attends science fiction conventions, not in drag, but with a copy of Ice Princess hoping she will sign it.  Really?  That’s not exactly normal.

Of course, everyone is abnormal in their own way, which is the great lie of normalcy.  But Facebook is a public airing of these slight deviations.  The fact that I might blog seems trivial in comparisons to such weird escapades.  In face, their unusualness makes me feel slightly more usual and normal in response.  It’s therapy without the hundreds in session fees.  It’s a high school reunion where there’s no chance of being cornered and talking to someone you couldn’t stand twenty years ago, let alone now.

Facebook is Plato’s cave—showing us mere shadows of reality, and we’re quite pleased to indulge in them.  Nothing is what it seems, because we seem the height of normalcy, but it’s so much easier than actual human contact that might shear out fantasy, right?  Marx might have called religion the opium of the people, but that’s only because he never saw Facebook.

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