Facebook Is A Million Years Old

A case for using Facebook for those who find Facebook creepy

Six months ago I thought Facebook was for losers. But I was wrong. Not merely wrong, but a hypocrite.

If you had asked me about Facebook back then, I would have told you that I don't want to be on it because it represents something gone wrong somehow with our ability to socialize "naturally" . People I knew who used Facebook seemed to be almost addicted to it. To me it was like they were taking time away from their real life to be living a pseudo-life online.

I didn't really distinguish Facebook from social networks that are more overt about creating an alternate fantasy world, like Second Life or World Of Warcraft . Exchanging the results of personality tests, like "Which Sex And The City Character Are You?" seemed just as arbitrary as acquiring points and magic weapons. Do I really care what the last book you read was? Wouldn't it be more normal to just talk about books and movies over a coffee when we actually meet face to face?

Why would I want to read someone else's lists of favourite music? Why would I want to post mine? Isn't a little weird that I can see photo albums of people I don't even know? Why do people make such annoying profiles on MySpace ? Who would want to read the reams of mundane observations on blogger.com ? Is Facebook any better or worse than other sites that do the same thing? If I want to take advantage of new ways to stay in touch, isn't email or Skype good enough? At least with those there isn't some middle man helping me shape how I present myself.

Still, I couldn't help but notice that Facebook had been sweeping through my various groups of friends over the last half year or so. People I knew in North America were talking about it from a while back. More recently, it has made headway into the community of English speaking foreigners living in Tokyo, where I am. People who are not what one would think of as computer nerds or having any difficulty socializing in the real world were getting online. There had to be something going on.

Whither Facebook

The first question is, why choose any one service, such as Facebook over any one of the many other social networking sites available? This question we can handle fairly easily. While the makers of Facebook surely want you to believe they matter more because they do things better than MySpace or Second Life , the reality is that social networking sites just become popular because of their popularity. The more people involved, the more useful it is, and so people join because others have joined. This is true of a lot of communication technologies. There's no point in owning a phone if there's no one to call. But as more people have them, the more it makes sense to get one.

At some point in recent years, Facebook has passed that crucial tipping point to where it has wide adoption in the social scene. But we should keep in mind that this pervasiveness is fleeting. From Usenet , to IRC , to web forums , mailing lists , and more, there have been many ways to socialize online, and there will be more to come.

The question, then, isn't why should anyone use Facebook , but why should people use any social networking site , whichever one happens to be the most common?

From the outside perspective of people who have misgivings about such sites , they all seem to share the same problem. The vast majority of people sharing details about themselves online seem to be doing it because they want to get something, not because they have much to offer. After all, aren't people on Match.com there because on some level they're in need? Is anyone on a dating site because they're already so popular and successful that they just can't help but want to share themselves with the world?

Aren't people who are genuinely interesting and cool probably too busy actually doing stuff to be spending much time on Twitter letting their friends know they are about to have dinner or go to work? This is the issue at the heart of why I considered people socializing online to be kind of lame.

Self Proclaimed Coolness

It seemed to me that you could tell where people were placed in the social hierarchy by looking how much they need to tell you about how interesting they are. The more a person needs to tell me about how cool they are, the less cool they actually are. It's not like the famous elite of movies, music, sports, or politics spend long nights checking the latest activity on Facebook , or writing lengthy entries on LiveJournal about the minutiae of how their friends don't understand them.

Celebrities don't generally need to post information about themselves online because there is already market demand for information about them. A market demand that can even go so far as to be invasive, like when paparazzi hire helicopters to buzz over private weddings. Whether or not that kind of interest in celebrities is justified, the fact remains that for a long time, how much you were informed about a person through the media was correlated with their social status. More importantly, information of them was a by product of their fame, not necessarily something they wanted to let you know about. Not to mention that sometimes you don't want to know it either. I couldn't care less about the personal lives of Britney Spears or Brangelina , but information about them is so pervasive that it's actually more effort to avoid any knowledge of them than it is to try and delete the information from my brain when the gossip reaches me.

In my grandparent's day, the dividing lines between who was popular among friends, and who was being read about in the society pages of magazines was a lot more clear. These days, the line between being popular and being a celebrity is much more blurry. Along with that blurriness comes a lot of fuzzy boundaries on who I expect to be informed about, what information I get, and how it comes to me. The confusion only increases when you take into account that more changes keep coming faster than we can adapt to what's already changed. I found myself feeling that people who were posting information about themselves on line were acting something like wannabe-celebrities, possibly indicating some kind of overblown sense of how interested others would be in them.

Sometimes blogs by friends seemed like homework assigned by them outside of the moments of actual interaction. What, it's not good enough that I catch up time to time over coffee or at parties? Now I'm supposed to read them ramble on about some self inflicted psycho-trauma that I never even asked about? Even if I was interested in everything they wanted to say, I don't think I could keep up with the volume of information that would be created if every one of my friends kept a regular blog.

I was coming at the issue from the wrong perspective, though, because I was evaluating what is considered "cool" or "normal" behaviour based on a time frame of how society has changed within the last few decades. Social changes over a hundred years, or even a thousand, are interesting and informative. But when we're trying to get at the root of our intuitive notions of what "feels" right or "natural", we've got to dig way, way deeper.

Altered States

For better and for worse, we have a lot of features of our make up as a species that we developed in an environment completely unlike the one we live in right now. Humans have been around for a couple hundred thousand years or so, give or take, depending on where you want to draw lines between species. We're here today as a species not only because we successfully adapted to the landscapes around us, but formed cohesive social bonds within our packs that made us stronger than any of us could have been as individuals.

All of our current modern environment has only existed for not even one percent of the total time we have been a species. When I say "our" current environment, I am speaking about you and me in the sense of the kind of people who have the privilege of access to the internet, where we are sharing this article. As William Gibson said, "The future is here, it's just not distributed evenly". There are a lot of people alive today who don't have access to the opportunities technology offers, so please take the generalities of this article to be a shorthand for talking about those of us lucky enough to engage in both the problems and opportunities of the most modern human environment.

Anyway, some of the technologies that profoundly affect how we socialize, like the whole concept of written language, can seem to be really, really old when compared to the technologies that have only just popped up, like the internet. But even the most ancient technologies are brand spanking new developments from the point of view of evolution. Everything we consider to be a component of modern life has only been around for a blip of time, way too short for us to have made any physiological adaptations.

Our physiological adaptations aren't a just a matter of how many fingers and toes we have. Our brains are wired up in a physical way that predisposes us to certain behaviours as well. Our clever and cognitively adaptive fore brain has to constantly contend with the urges and instincts of the more primal hind brain. Neither one is master of the other. Our rational selves can, with patience and practise, learn to calm the tempestuous nature of our base instincts, and our gut reactions can take over for good or bad in the heat of the moment.

To tease out any conclusions about which part of our brain is having more influence at any one time, it helps to look at how we behaved in that vast period of time that we evolved in, and compare and contrast it to the tiny speck of time that encompasses the entirety of what we consider modern life.

The Good Old Days Probably Kind Of Sucked

The social scene back in the evolutionary day was wildly different than what it looks like now. Last time I had a conversation about Facebook , I was sitting at a dinner table in a restaurant with a group of friends. That simple gathering, much like gatherings that people do all the time without a moments consideration of its nature, is completely unlike any kind of gathering that ever happened before. It's not at all the kind of gathering we're built for.

You might suppose that gathering around a meal is the most natural type of gathering of all. Second only to sex, maybe. But let's put aside the superficial differences.

Obviously, back in the evolutionary day, there were no restaurants, and in its place we can imagine ourselves sitting around in a natural setting, like a forest. No one is holding an iPhone , no one is wearing anything bought at H&M . Some people might have sharpened sticks, or maybe wearing a roughly cut animal skin. It's debatable and unclear when those kinds of developments came along.

Still, despite the lack of modern accessories, humans gathering around shared food seems like an activity that's more or less consistent throughout history. But it's how we, as a group, came to know each other where the world we live in now is nothing like the world we used to know.

In the restaurant, in this particular gathering I'm remembering, the people around me are essentially a random collection of people I met through various social paths, like work, parties, friends of friends, or whatever else. I haven't known any of them for more than a decade.

In the forest, humans were born, lived, and died, surrounded by the same people they always knew. No one was introduced through a friend of a friend. There were no parties. There was work, in hunting or gathering, but when people went to forage or hunt, they would leave together and come back together. They didn't interact with coworkers that were from other groups. My understanding is that scientists estimate that pre-tribal packs of people could be anywhere from a dozen or so up to about a hundred and eighty individuals. The group would consist of a few extended families, close enough for familiarity, but diverse enough to be safe for breeding.

The people I'm having dinner with, I see every now and again as our schedules permit, and more or less everything I know about them arises from our shared activities and what they choose to reveal. There's some gossip that came to me indirectly about this person or that person. But in any case, the short amount of time I spend with these people alone restricts how well I know them.

Contrast that with us as we were in the forest, where we would have migrated around together, constantly. For the overwhelming majority of time, everyone you knew would be within arms length or a short walking distance of you at all times. If you laughed, coughed, or burped, just about everyone you knew would know as well, and know at very the moment it happened. There was no gossip after the fact, not merely because there was no verbal language anyway, but also no need given the immediacy of almost all information.

The Selfish Gene

It was generally safer to be together all the time, as individual humans who strayed too far from the pack for too long were easy pickings for predators. Not to mention that they would miss out on shared resources and breeding opportunities.

It's just as important to note, however, that there was a competing instinct that existed simultaneously, which is that it was sometimes beneficial to sneak off on one's own. To have one's own stash of food, to make a secret liaison with a forbidden sex partner, or simply to hide when a predator snagged someone else in the group. Being with the group was great and all, but sometimes you had to look out for number one.

If you could get some time. Now, with the ease that we can be alone at our discretion, we might not be able to appreciate how hard it was to go off by oneself for any purpose. If you got up to go eat a nice mango that you had hidden in the trunk of a tree somewhere, just about everyone would be aware right off the bat that you were getting up and going somewhere. And since no one had much going on in their lives, even the most basic action of going somewhere different from where others were could be considered interesting enough to look at. Maybe even interesting enough to get up and follow you, thus defeating the whole purpose of you getting up. It was probably really, really difficult to get a little "me" time back then. Not impossible, but rare and precious.

Maybe precisely because individual privacy was such a precious thing in our evolutionary past, throughout history the pioneers of invention were naturally drawn to meet that need. Long before the internet, things like cars, planes, and transportation in general, have allowed us to physically move with greater ease and willfulness away from our packs. Isn't the greatest attraction for every teenager who wants a car the ability to drive away from their parents?

It's not just about physical distance, either. The printing press, radio, television, and media in general, has more and more allowed us to decide what we want to know, which might be different from what our friends know. When two people watch different television channels, technology is allowing them to individuate themselves from each other. They know different things, and see the world differently. This is heightened that much more as the internet allows us to take individual choices further and further.

The Me Generation

This trend has swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that now, unlike the vast time of our evolution, individuality is often the norm. Where I come from, it's expected that when you reach adulthood, considered to be around 18 or 20 or so, you'll leave home, and there will most likely be a period of time before starting a new family where you will live alone. The point of this cultural practise, if it can be said that there is a deliberate point, is to seek out one's own identity, progressing hopefully upwards from where you came from. You are theoretically free to redefine the aspects of your life that you were endowed with, and add into the mix new people and new ideas that create a whole new identity. A new individual, more defined personally than communally.

The price of individualism is an unavoidable amount of isolation, even if it's more by the thoughts you choose to have than by physical location. Even under normal circumstances that involve other people, such as going to work, and meeting friends at parties, and maybe even living with a room mate or lover, this is a very different reality from the one we are built for. The people in our modern social scene live in categories, exposed only to certain parts of us, and define us in ways that we may feel does not represent us. I think a lot of people feel that outside a handful of close relationships, most of the people in our lives don't really know us.

The fragmentation of our lives that we take to be normal is broken up along an axis of time as well. I take it to be normal that I have met maybe thousands of people, from brief acquaintances to good friends, not to mention my family. Some people I have lost touch with, and there are people I haven't even met yet. At any one time I probably have a handful of people I consider very close, a few dozen casual acquaintances I hang out with time to time, and maybe hundreds of people I could claim to know, even if just a little. All the people I know over my life will flow in and out of those categories over time.

Totally different from the forest, where the people I would know would be present at my birth, and most new people I would meet would come into my world by being born to someone I else I knew. No one left home for college, looked for work on the other side of the country, or took off to live in South East Asia to "find themselves". In the forest, everyone you knew would continue to be someone you knew until they died or you did. There was a fairly rare occurrence of individuals, probably adolescent males, switching packs, or at least looking for sexual liaisons, which would have helped genetic diversity. But that kind of switch was a risky undertaking of life and death proportions, making it infrequent enough to be beside the point.

Water, Water Everywhere, And Not A Drop To Drink

Then there are whole new categories of people in our lives that didn't even exist before, like strangers. Where I live, Tokyo, has something like 13 million people . And yet the social interactions, similar to any big city, are such that I wouldn't just talk about my personal affairs to whoever of that 13 million happens to be beside me. With the vast majority of them, like the ones surrounding me on a train or in a Starbucks , I maintain the standard civil illusion that I don't even really notice them, since to stare or engage them without a reason would be unusual or rude.

Simply walking down a busy street might be a bit stressful for a forest dwelling human. If I walk from my home to the grocery store, I'll pass by more individuals in fifteen minutes than humans would have ever known in their entire lives in the forest. Yet at the same time I would be completely by myself. That we take this situation for granted is evidence of our rational brain's ability to adapt to scenarios never before encountered by our biology. But at the same time, adaptation doesn't mean the eradication of the instincts under the surface, it merely means we cope with those feelings. Sometimes our coping mechanisms are stronger or weaker, depending on what else might be happening in our lives. Sometimes, I can viscerally feel the underlying internal discordance with this situation in the form of a particular kind of loneliness, the loneliness of having a surplus of strangers.

TMI

We were born, lived, and died together, and our relationships were continuous and intimately close. But so what? We seem to be more or less comfortable now. Maybe we're even better off.

Even in small town communities, where people might choose to live out their entire lives in a place where everyone knows everyone's name, it's still preferred behaviour to go home to your family inside a home where the rest of the community can not see or hear you. The people at work see you at work. Your friends see you at your usual hang out. Your family sees you at home. You can mix them together sometimes, but it's largely at your choosing. You can define yourself differently to different people. It's considered the standard that at night, you sleep alone or with one other person who knows you in an extremely private way. No one else knows what you get up to in your bedroom, and most of us like it that way. I know I do.

Imagine all your work mates, friends, family, and even lovers, all present, all the time. Imagine such a lack of privacy that even sex is considered mundane enough to not be shocking, but just another thing that people who know you very well could casually observe you doing. Humans are unusual among animal species in that we consider sex a private act, and some evolutionary theories about humans account for this by speculating there might have been advantages in keeping your liaisons vague. Even if that's true, we should still put this in the broader context that secret sex acts, no matter how advantageous, were probably difficult to pull off given the constant presence of the pack. That we take for granted that sex should be private is another testament to the degree to which we have mastered our environment.

I don't know about you, but while I can intellectually envision it on some level, kind of like watching a nature documentary on television, I can't get a real feel for the lack of privacy that existed in the forest society. I shudder to think about having that kind of familiarity with my friends. That two of them could casually start having sex during our dinner at the restaurant without it even stopping the conversation among everyone else confronts me with a mish mash of mental imagery and reactions that I'd rather not have.

Where we are now feels so much like normal, and the forest seems so primitive and animalistic, that our evolutionary context is disconnected to the point of being repugnant in many ways. But it's the forest society that's the default "normal" scene that we evolved to cope with. Before we had language and society and the ability to start saying things like "hey, could you turn around for a second?", that's what we expected from day to day life. For tens of thousands of generations.

You were built with an expectation that for the most part you didn't have to do anything proactive to really follow the goings on of the rest of the pack. At most, you had to turn your head to look in the direction of the person you were curious enough to look at. In other words, your ability to know what everyone around you was doing was almost entirely passive.

This is one aspect of the kind of social networking that internet social technologies are now tapping into. And it is a start toward the reason for why I say Facebook is a million years old. Don't confuse the medium of packets of electronic data zipping around with the content of social signals being sent from one human to another. Social networking sites are not creating a new way for us to socialize on top of the pile of other behaviours. They are tapping into feelings that have always existed underneath the surface. Feelings so strong that some people refer to Facebook as "Crackbook ".

When you read on Twitter , or on a Facebook update, that your friend is now going out for coffee, or on Blogger about how your friend felt about having gone for coffee yesterday, you're not supposed to care. You're simply supposed to know.

Forget everything about what your fore brain says about the practical value of that information. Your fore brain is trying to assess the information in terms of objective utility, which isn't anything that your emotional hind brain cares about. Just roll with it, because your primal brain does. It thinks it's normal to have a continually running awareness of the people you know, and considers the world as working properly when it does. After all, as far as your hind brain is concerned, that's the way it's always been.

No Excuse For Being A Dick

Don't mistake me for a biological determinist, though. What's a biological determinist? Here's an example. In another conversation one time with some guys, one was talking about how he was feeling guilty about cheating on his girlfriend. Another sagely advised that the situation was inevitable. "It's in our DNA", he said, "We can't help but be unfaithful, because it's our instinct to try and spread our genes to many offspring by mating with as many women as possible, and there's nothing you can do about it."

That's biological determinism. The idea that for all our ability to reason and plan, at the end of the day, there is a hierarchy of will, and our primal urges reign supreme. One shouldn't feel too guilty about having broken the social contract of monogamy because it's trumped by the instinctual pursuit of procreation.

It's bullshit, of course. Human society has succeeded precisely because we can successfully negotiate with our primal instincts. We don't just go and kill anyone who upsets us. We can walk down a street full of strangers without freaking out, even though in our evolutionary past there were no strangers, only competitors for resources, and potentially hostile foes. We can choose to eat healthy, even though we want to eat the foods that immediately satisfy our primal desires for sugars and fats. We compromise on all sorts of wants and desires for greater social and personal good that ultimately comes back to benefit us in the longer term. Any person who exercises restraint on what they eat can tell you that it's not an easy balance to strike, and we don't always succeed. But it is possible individually, and it's critically important socially.

Besides, the justifications for cheating that these guys were spewing are, as all biological determinism is, ultimately just a self serving defense of "I couldn't help it!". None of the guys in the conversation would accept biological determinism as a excuse if one of their girlfriends cheated on them, even though it's just as much as a biological imperative for a woman to have multiple sex partners as it is for a man.

Let's put biological determinism aside then, because it's not the case that our need to passively know what others are doing appeals to us and that's the end of the story. There's a complicated relationship between our rationality, our instincts, and the environment that we have created. They all push and pull at each other, with no one factor consistently coming out on top.

It's Not You, It's Me

We need a more nuanced explanation of our feelings about social networking than simply being at the mercy of our impulses. If we were just biologically determined, then we could probably make the web page that provides the right stimulus to get the right response and be done with it. But there's a range of reactions to any and all online services, social networking and otherwise, indicating a more complicated interplay at work. After all, we haven't really answered the question of why some people think Facebook is creepy and some people don't.

After all, the problem clearly isn't in wanting to know about others. If it were just a matter of wanting to know what others are doing, you could easily get on Facebook and post the minimum personal information, keeping yourself private but benefiting from knowing about others. While some people do that, enough volunteer their own information to make the whole thing work.

Is it just part of a social contract that if others are going to volunteer information about themselves then I should too? That may be fair, but I think we all know that fairness as a motivator only goes so far. If that's all there was to it, then Facebook would be at risk of breaking down under the people attempting to win the cost and benefit balance by only offering a minimum while trying to get a maximum return. I think there has to be a more personally derived motivation for putting yourself out there. Something more internal than fair play that motivates a majority of members to willingly provide the personal information that makes Facebook work for everyone on it.

I think an answer lies in the less explored flip side of having evolved in an environment without privacy. Even if you might not always like it, your expectation is that everyone else knows about you as much as you know about them. I would call this "passive acknowledgement". In the forest, no one had to do anything to have others know about them. It was coming to understand this aspect of our social evolution that changed my mind about going on Facebook .

If we were back in that primal forest, I wouldn't have to tell you I'm going to go pick berries, you'd just know when I got up and start heading over to the berry patch. In the primitive environment of our evolutionary upbringing, it would be completely unnecessary to ever go around and alert everyone to what you were up to. Since it was completely unnecessary to tell people what you were doing, then it was probably never done. And now that we are put in a situation where we are compelled to do something we never did before, is it so surprising that some of us find it weird?

Dare I suggest that a proactively informative person might be considered to have an insecure need for attention? That's projecting a lot of modern day psychology onto anthropological situations, so I don't mean it too literally. I just mean that a parallel could be drawn between how the need for attention would be considered unusual in that past context, and how the need to talk about one's life on Blogger can be perceived as unnecessarily informative.

I suspect that for a lot of people, myself included, it just feels unnatural. That feeling, stemming from the intuitive and instinctual part of our brains, is essentially the same as our what our primitive monkey selves might feel if they saw another monkeys screaming for attention. Why would any monkey ever need to do that? Why should I have to do that?

Being Uncool Can Be Fatal

What I realized was that deep down, a part of me, I suspect a primal part of me, was resenting the fact that "passive acknowledgement" is no longer an option in human relations. I wasn't just the monkey looking around and judging other people's behaviour. I was also the monkey moving around and doing things and people hardly ever noticed. Which, in the primitive forest, would only happen if someone was completely alone, or if the group was deliberately ignoring you.

It's critical to understand just how unnatural those circumstances are to your primal brain in order to see how it could inspire a strong feeling of resistance. Neither case, being disliked or truly alone, was likely to have ever happened in the forest. Back in those days, our social interactions didn't have the range of subtlety and complexity as it does now. There wasn't any passive aggressiveness, for example, because that takes many layers of social conventions and cultural norms to pull off. Primitive humans didn't exchange cold civilities, they punched each other in the face.

Back in the evolutionary day, if you fell out of favour of the pack, you were either already dead or soon to be. Not that the group would necessarily deliberately set out to kill you, though they might if you were a big enough problem. They probably didn't have to in most cases. If you were a problem for the group in any way, you would probably just be abandoned or denied shared resources. You'd be left to the mercy of the forest, where there wasn't any mercy on offer.

There was no room in the forest society for extraneous people, so if you were still alive and in your group, it meant you were more or less accepted and active within it. If you are not being acknowledged, as far as your primitive brain sees it, you might die.

Like A Punch To The Face

On some level, it's like any other threat. Like a punch to the face, for example. A punch to the face is a threat that inspires the fight or flight reflex of your primitive brain. But we are more complicated than that, so we don't merely sprint away or flail wildly just because someone throws a punch at us. We try to use our rational fore brains to assess the situation for the best long term benefit.

If, for example, a friend got way too drunk and for some dumb reason threw a punch at you, you wouldn't beat the crap out of him because you'd look like a real dick in the eyes of your friends, watching you pummel a dude too drunk to defend himself. You wouldn't go running screaming either, because then you'd be the topic of many embarrassing anecdotes for years to come. The best reaction would be something balanced, between pure fight or flight. Like, for example, calming the friend down, and waiting until they've sobered up before telling them off for being a drunk loser.

That's an idealized reaction, though. As you well know, we don't always make the best long term choices. We get angry and frightened and react in ways that might not be so smooth. In fact, since our society is now so complicated with so many layers of social convention, in many situations it's often hard to know what response would have the best long term results. Within that context of complexity, it's pretty easy for the more impulsive part of you to jump in and take the lead.

When that happens, our rational fore brain often doesn't want to admit that we are nothing more than stimulus and response, so we come up with explanations after the fact and fool ourselves into thinking they were the reasons we had before we acted. So, for example, if the guy who was punched by the drunk friend loses his cool and punches back, he might very likely try and explain it as having been a necessary response. The drunk guy was too far out of control, you see, and punching back was the only way to really stop him. Anyway, the drunk guy might have started hitting other people, so really it was an act of protecting others. Makes perfect sense, right?

The difference between a threat like being punched and a threat like losing social status is that one is a lot more tangible and easier to perceive than the other. A punch in the face happens at a distinct moment in time, and you can see and feel it. A lack of connection to your friends and family is an ever present problem, without any distinct physical evidence. It's buried under the Chekhovian web of intricacies that are our daily social lives.

Regardless of how vague your perception of a lack of passive acknowledgement is, so long as you are being denied the sense of connection to your community, you feel threatened. A nebulous sense of threat that can manifest as loneliness, resentment, distrust, depression, and too many other ways to list here.

For me, it was largely a kind of resentment. Since there is no more passive acknowledgement in human relations, that means the only way to get acknowledged is to be proactive. Logic which you can turn around and look at it from the opposite side, meaning that if you have to be proactive, then that is evidence that you are not already part of a group.

One response is to pretend that you don't have to be proactive, to tell yourself you don't need acknowledgement, in order to hide from the fact that one's social scene is stunted by the default individualism of modern society. Being asked to put myself out there, by creating a Facebook page for example, is essentially asking me to publicly declare that I am not already socially connected and need to repair my sense of abandonment from the pack by being proactive.

That's kind of uncomfortable to admit, but I think it explains my derisiveness more accurately than previous opinions on Facebook , because it takes into account the emotional component of my reactions. After all, most of the time we are dumping on other people it's because actually, to some degree, we are dissatisfied with something inside ourselves. This is why I said at the beginning of this article that my previous reaction to Facebook was, on some level, hypocritical.

You Can Only Choose If you Know The Options

On the other end of the scale from me are people who solve the problem of a lack of passive acknowledgement by jumping right in to new opportunities. Social proactivity? No problem! The seductive pull of more social connection overshadows any hesitancy.

In fact, it seems a little weird, when described this way, that anyone would ever prefer to sacrifice the benefits of increased socialization because of some awkwardness over being proactive about offering information about themselves. After all, surely it's obvious that greater benefit would come from increasing one's social network rather than preserve one's sense of dignity.

That's your rational brain assessing the choice on pragmatic grounds, through, and it can only do so when the choice is clearly identified. Up until I had defined the problem, there was no clear decision to be made, and so the hind brain was left alone to respond without being burdened with any logical analysis.

Those who jumped into Facebook didn't necessarily have any rationality for doing it, their hind brains just went for it. It could be argued that people who already feel a degree of satisfaction with their level of social connectivity are more likely to adopt proactive socializing options. Because being presented with the choice to join or not join is not in itself a judgement of their current sense of acceptance.

I don't think one could accurately use willingness to join a social network as an indicator of self-assessed social connectivity, though. From what I can see, people's social aptitude and opinions about sites like Facebook are all over the map, making any trends impossible to discern. More likely is that the choice of joining or not joining Facebook was just made in a context when conditions were comfortable for the hind brain response. Nothing more, nothing less.

Personally, now that I have identified the problem, I can take it to my rational brain and ask myself, which would I rather have? Pay the price of the awkward feeling of putting my profile online in order to expand my social network, or maintain a sense of identity that equates proactivity with a desperate need for attention?

As I write this, I have been on Facebook for a number of months, and can clearly identify benefits in terms of new friends made, friendships maintained, and attending social scenes I would have missed otherwise. I'm not saying that Facebook is this amazingly wonderful thing that changed my life. It hasn't replaced other usual methods of interaction. It just has provided enough benefit to be worth being on it.

And yet, despite the clearly measurable benefits that my rational fore brain can see with ease, I still feel a little weird putting information out there. For example, I still cringe a little when friends upload photos of me, and hesitate to upload my own. With almost every part of my profile I feel like anyone who looks at it would wonder why I am making that information public. The hind brain does not change its mind easily.

Every time I feel that twinge of being creeped out, though, my rational brain simply tells my primal brain, "deal with it". It's the same advice I would give to any friend who expressed doubts over using Facebook , or whatever other online networking system.

Unnatural Is The New Normal

The reason for that advice is that all of us, even the most Facebook sceptical of my friends, are just being arbitrary in rejecting socializing online. Because nobody in modern society is interacting "naturally" anymore. If you get in a car or train, to go meet the people you want to hang out with, or call them up on the phone, you are using technology to maintain your social life. If you met these people through work, through a newspaper ad, through a shared sport, or anything else, then you are relating to these people in a particular context that only exists because of all the technologies we have. It may seem natural because they've been around for as long as you've been alive . But nature is working on a time scale way, way longer than any one person's lifetime.

Unless you are only hanging out with the people who are born within your extended family, only meeting them by walking, and only communicating through direct face to face speech, then you are reliant on "unnatural" technology for your social life. That you choose to reject online social networking sites isn't a rejection of "unnatural" means of interaction, it's your primal brain making inconsistent choices because it doesn't look at the whole picture. Your primal brain just reacts, and which technologies it said yes or no to were merely a matter of having had a comfortable context at the moment it was presented. If you are reading this, then you are a human who participates in a society that is nothing but unnatural.

Rejecting Facebook in particular on grounds of how "normal" it seems is not just an arbitrary decision within a big mash up of all sorts of arbitrary judgements of all the available technologies. It's worse than that, because you're rejecting one of the few technologies that works to give back some of the acknowledgement by your peers that you lost to other technologies.

Being on Facebook isn't the same as getting the passive acknowledgement our hind brains hope for, but it's pretty much as close as we're going to get in the context of current technologies. It's not a perfect solution, or a permanent one, but it's a step in the right direction. That's the reason I got on Facebook . The specific service itself can come or go, but there's a new reality emerging that needs to be embraced.

Because while Facebook itself is likely to not last, online socializing in some form or another is almost certain to expand in options and pervasiveness to the point of becoming a de facto reality. At the same time, options for maintaining privacy and fragmenting our social lives will also increase. In the face of that ever increasing diversity of options, it makes sense to have a sense of self that is not only personally defined, and shaped for public consumption, but also consistent and separate from any one service.

The Digital Forest

Think of the online world as the new digital forest, and you're constructing a public version of yourself in it. You include all the parts you want people to see, and dispense with the rest. Define that person very clearly for yourself, because the stronger your sense of identity, the more you can adapt if the forest changes. When Facebook dies, as I suspect it will, if you know what it is about yourself you want to share with the world, you can easily transport to the next big thing. If you're only filling out your list of favourite music and movies because Facebook offered you an application to do so, then you might find your online identity being distorted by the surrounding environment. You'll get frustrated when Facebook dies, and your sense of self shouldn't be tied to a brand.

The big difference, in my view, between this new online digital forest and the one we evolved in isn't all the graphics, wifi access, streaming video, or any of that stuff. The difference is that now socializing takes proactivity. Whether you choose to socialize on Facebook , World Of Warcraft , or Adult Friend Finder , you have to make decisions on where and how you want to exist in other people's social spheres.

And you have to do it proactively. Earlier I said I don't know why I would want to continually read my friends blogs, or even if I could keep up with all the information. But that's not the point. People making that information available is a matter of offloading their identity online, where it can be referenced at the leisure of anyone who wants to look. It's replacing the pervasive presence we used to have with each other with the option of being ever present in the digital forest. It's not so important that you always read your friend's latest blog entries. It's only important that you know it's there, to reference when you want, so that they are ever present in your pack, like how they used to always be within arm's reach in the forest we evolved in.

Even the famous elite of movies, music, politics, and sports that I mentioned earlier will most likely want to start developing online personae. After all, the market demand for knowing about them is built on just as many artificial conditions as everyone else's social life. The way they can be passive about having other people find out about them may make some amount of sense to their primal expectations, but the fact is that the information gets filtered through secondary sources before reaching the public is completely unnatural.

In the forest, since there was no language, there was no second hand information. If you didn't see someone do something, then no one told you about it later. Now, people do that as a matter of course, and when they do, they put their own perceptions into it. At some point, as it becomes more common for people to proactively define themselves, we may see more celebrity participation, so as to gain more control over the message that goes out.

For them, and for us, and for everybody who lives where the future has been distributed to us, the days of passive acknowledgement are gone, never to return again.

Adapt, or be abandoned by the pack.

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