I owe Facebook an apology.
by Barry Friedman
(no politics today)
I need to apologize.
To Facebook.
You heard right.
A few years back, I did a horrendous commentary on public radio about Facebook and the vacuity of those on it. The insights were as deep as a kiddie pool, it was poorly researched, and I took cheap shots at people who posted cat photos.
I want to correct that now.
I posted cat photos.
See, we had this cat, we thought was a male, but wasn't--a fact confirmed when he/she had kittens, kittens whose photos I posted on Facebook, along with an announcement that we were giving the kittens to people who owned a farm.
In the comments that followed, I got yelled at.
Don't you know that farm cats almost always get killed by other animals, are starved, or run over by tractors?
My response:
How would I know that? I didn't know the cat had a vagina.
I was hooked.
I now look forward to the cherry-picked statistics on ACA and “quotes” from GOD, recipes and selfie photos, Top Ten Lists, requests for mechanics and orthodontists, and arguments with lunatic gun owners, Cowboys fans, and birthers.
And mostly the long--if I'm lucky--Sorkin-like streams of consciousness of the threads.
I’m addicted. I'm afraid, when I'm away from Facebook (offline, engaging in actual life), I'm going to be late for something. My daughter, who will soon be 25, tells me I'm like a teenage girl.
I'm worse. I started sending out FRIEND requests.
I could tell you I do it for the marketing, for getting my work out, including these posts (which I've linked) to a wider audience—and there’s some of that, but it’s the human contact I really want, as counterintuitive as that sounds.
My son would have been thirty this year—he died six years ago. And I tell you this because Facebook made the insupportable bearable.
I posted Paul’s picture on my homepage, I linked to an essay I had written. The responses, the support, the good wishes and love I received felt—I don’t know how else to describe this--like prayers. On that day, hundreds of people, most of whom didn’t know me, much less Paul—and certainly didn’t know each other—seemed, simultaneously, to think about my son and his death and me and my pain. All day, their thoughts were linked with mine.
To me, that’s prayer.
It was as palpable as if they were surrounding me in a sanctuary. And if Candy Crush invitations are Facebook, so, too, is a note from a woman in Indonesia in a hijab who wrote that she thought my son was handsome.
And now to Gary and Sharon.
I met Gary on Facebook, for his college roommate was Charles P. Pierce of Esquire, on whose blog I have spent much of my waking life the past eighteen months (I only exaggerate a little). In one of his posts, Charlie quoted from Jim Bouton’s BALL FOUR, only the most important baseball book ever written, and then I joined in, as did Gary (as the three of us have inexplicably and perhaps unhealthily committed the book to memory). Charlie then “introduced” us and Gary and I started messaging each other … about politics and relationships, and eventually he, along with his girlfriend, Sharon, invited Melissa, my girlfriend, and me down to Dallas.
We decided to go.
It felt like a blind date.
Melissa and I figured if it didn’t go well, it would be one meal out of our lives. We’d be in Dallas, we’d survive. We’d spend the day at IKEA. Dinner was scheduled.
We met in the lobby of our hotel.
They looked like a Gary and Sharon should look. My fear is that everyone online is a 700-pound shut-in, watching a 13" black and white television on a wobbly table, petting a mangy dog, and eating soup from a can, but Gary and Sharon were normal human beings—they looked like … us.
The friendship was immediate—like walking in to a college dorm room and knowing you and your roommate will get along.
We hugged them. They hugged us.
Strangers.
Later that night at dinner, Gary decided to call Charlie; so, there I was: having dinner with someone I didn’t know, talking on the phone with someone else I didn’t know; yet, it felt, oddly, like three friends catching up. Remarkably real, yet by any standard, not.
We took pictures, mostly of Sharon and Melissa, which we posted.
Charlie made fun in the comments. Gary and I made fun of him making fun.
So, okay, Facebook, wittingly or not, has probably forwarded every birthday message and snarky post I’ve ever written to the NSA, but I forgive it, for at that moment, in a steak house in Dallas, Zuckerberg deserved all his billions.
He brought people who otherwise wouldn’t have been together together.
Someone asked Laurence Olivier once why he acted and he said, “The same reason everyone else does: love me, love me, love me.”
We’re on Facebook, all of us, I think, in some measure, for similar reasons--acceptance, status, belonging.
LIKE me, LIKE me, LIKE me.