On Facebook

"It's given me a tool for exceptionally mindless, voyeuristic, puerile procrastination; crowd-sourced pesky problems like finding a new accountant; stoked my narcissism; warmed my heart with nostalgia; and created a euphoric, irrational, irresistible belief in the good in men's hearts among the most skeptical people I know--people who should know better." That is Vanessa Grigoriadis, in New York magazine, about Facebook, in another one of her fine explorations of the illusions of Internet life. Her animadversions about the Facebook ideal of the self begin with an account of the recent outrage provoked by the company's intention to use its members' content commercially. Did these innocents really expect discretion from the most formidable engine of indiscretion ever devised? Facebook is essentially a cheerful instrument of surveillance. It consists in two hundred million publicity campaigns. "I thought of my friends who had died of exposure," Nick Cave sings, "and I remembered other ones who had died from the lack of it." So it is heartening, I suppose, that some people are discovering the alienating consequences of early or excessive revelation--the dehumanization that results from "oversharing." What does it mean to know so much about someone whom you do not know at all? The problem is this. Intimacy cannot be achieved except by time. Knowledge of another individual must be gradual, or it is not knowledge at all--it is only information, which is what remains when you subtract time from knowledge. A person cannot be grasped by information. But the Internet, which reduces everything it contains to the status of information, will not tolerate any another pace. It believes above all in acceleration. And so it accelerates the experience of human encounter beyond the powers of the heart, into an impatient universe of recreational articulateness in which surfaces are advertised and trivialities are aggregated, and self-display precedes acquaintance, and strangers are "friends." It is a new kind of loneliness, defined paradoxically by the surfeit of possibility. In sum, it is a glass house, raised upon the denial that opacity is an element of dignity.

From The New Republic