[Infowarrior] - The Healing Powers of Facebook

[Richard Forno]

The Psychology of the Self and the Public Realm

The Healing Powers of Facebook
By MIKITA BROTTMAN

http://www.counterpunch.org/brottman01112010.html

Not long ago, the web was abuzz with the saga of Nathalie Blanchard, a  
29-year-old Canadian woman suffering from depression whose benefits  
were withdrawn when pictures appeared on Facebook showing her “having  
fun.” There are many reasons why this story is disturbing—it is scary  
to think that insurance companies employ representatives to patrol  
Facebook, for one thing—but perhaps most troublesome is the idea that  
anyone would believe there to be a direct correlation between a  
person’s Facebook profile and their inner life.

The people I know who spend the most time on Facebook are introverts,  
who would prefer to leave a message on someone’s “wall” than risk an  
encounter in the flesh. Most truly outgoing people, in my experience,  
are much too busy with work, friends and kids to spend hours sitting  
around downloading pictures, filling out quizzes and fiddling with  
apps. In this sense, Facebook is a substitution for a busy social  
life, not a reflection of it. More often than not, uploading pictures  
to your profile may be a form of compensation—a way of assuring others  
(and yourself) that you do, in fact, have friends, with whom you  
sometimes appear to “have fun.” In this respect, Nathalie Blanchard’s  
“happy” pictures would be a confirmation of her depression, rather  
than a refutation of it.

In this sense, I would argue that Facebook is, socially speaking,  
highly conservative, in that it encourages the establishment of a  
stable, orthodox “public self”. According to Facebook, if you are not  
“single,” “married” or “in a relationship”, then your only other  
option is the coy phrase, “it’s complicated” (and if you change your  
status to “single,” the announcement is accompanied by a tacky broken  
heart). You can be interested in “friendship,” “dating,” “a  
relationship” or “networking,” but that’s it—no voyeurism, flings,  
wife-swapping or morbid curiosity. We are inundated with warnings not  
to include anything “remotely inappropriate” in our profiles.  
Organizations that permit the use of Facebook generally do so with the  
caveat that you should not post anything you wouldn't want your  
grandmother, boss or shareholders to see (the family camping trip is  
fine, but the spree in Vegas is verboten). Most recently, on December  
10, the Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee ruled that the  
state’s judges and lawyers may no longer be Facebook friends, as it  
“creates the impression of a conflict of interest.”

And creating impressions, of course, is what Facebook is all about. In  
many ways, the Facebook profile is a return to the Victorian portrait  
photograph, which was a way for the middle classes to present a  
version of themselves suitable to the public sphere. Popular until the  
1920s among ladies and gents of a certain class, these daguerreotypes  
were a way of presenting a stage-managed version of themselves as they  
hoped to be seen (and measured) by others. In other words, their  
function was just as consciously performative and voyeuristic as the  
Facebook profile. Subjects would often be photographed wearing a very  
special item of clothing that they considered represented their essence 
—a characteristic fancy hat, for example, or an oriental parasol.

The austere clothing, erect backs and humorless expressions of the  
Victorians may no longer be in fashion, but we still like to see  
ourselves through other people’s eyes, cuddling our children or pets,  
showing off a favorite dress or indicative piece of furniture. The  
keen fisherman will inevitably represent himself with rod and tackle;  
the pro surfer will stand by the ocean with her board, and the proud  
gardener will stand among his prize-winning dahlias. Who we are, on  
Facebook, seems indistinguishable from what we do.

Or, at least, what we want to be seen doing. The fact is, we all “do”  
countless things, from brushing our teeth and using the toilet to  
driving, eating and doing our laundry, activities rarely seen in  
profile pictures.  People who spend a lot of time on Facebook may, in  
fact, devote most of their waking hours to sitting in front of their  
laptops, but very few people depict themselves this way. Similarly, we  
each play a number of roles—we are almost all consumers, employees,  
clients and subjects, for example, but how many of us define ourselves  
this way on Facebook? Instead, naturally perhaps, we see ourselves in  
relation to other human beings—our families and friends.

Yet as we all know, the Facebook persona is a public facade. However  
long may be our list of Facebook “friends”, most of us—according to  
statistics—are close to our partner (if we have one) and one or two  
best friends, just as we’ve always been. Still, we all like to  
maintain the illusion of popularity, so why not advertise the number  
of people we know, however remotely? In the same way, we are not  
always happy; we may actually be depressed most of the time, and yet,  
like Nathalie Blanchard and everyone else, we prefer to display  
photographs in which we appear to be “having fun.”

It is too easy, then, to criticize Facebook for the false promises of  
intimacy it holds out, a charge that has now become commonplace.  
Critic William Deresiewicz, in an essay published recently in the  
Chronicle of Higher Education, complains: “The new group friendship,  
already vitiated itself, is cannibalizing our individual friendships  
as the boundaries between the two blur.” The most disturbing thing  
about Facebook, according to Deresiewicz, is “the extent to which  
people are willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public.”

This is the same over-reaching that leads people to believe that,  
through its infiltration of our homes and its tracing of our personal  
habits, the Internet has robbed us of our privacy in unprecedented  
ways, a delusion which evaporates with the briefest glimpse backwards  
in time. As the author Jonathan Franzen points out, as recently as the  
early years of the 20th century, the average westerner lived in small  
town conditions of almost constant surveillance. Not only was every  
purchase, every appearance, every activity noticed, but it was noticed  
by people who knew you, and who also knew your parents, spouse,  
siblings, and children. “Compared to this,” claims Franzen, “our lives  
now are super anonymous, and we live with a striking degree of  
anonymity. In some ways, in fact, the Internet is the triumph of  
privacy”.

The Internet makes easier than ever, today—and more tempting—to live a  
very private life. By conducting all major transactions online, we can  
avoid face-to-face contact with shopkeepers, bank tellers,  
bureaucrats, service providers and other contingent samples of  
humanity, including—if we so wish—neighbors, colleagues, lovers,  
family members, and, yes, even friends. Yet however carefully we may  
have chosen the lives we now lead, it becomes difficult, as we get  
older, not to be seduced by the memories of a time when we were less  
private, and our lives less carefully mediated. It is no surprise  
that, in middle age (and those over 35 are the fastest growing  
demographic of Facebook users), many of us develop an obsession with  
maintaining contact with high school friends and childhood  
sweethearts. The further distant from them we grow, the more  
sentimental we tend to feel about our childhood and adolescent years  
and about our younger peers, even if they were no more than casual  
acquaintances at the time.

This is a natural development; it may also be a response to the way  
our present-day companions lose their gloss compared to mysterious  
lost loves of the past. It may also be an attempt to re-connect with  
images or signifiers of lost years that were “missed” at the time, due  
to emotional dissociation or psychological maladjustment. This theme-- 
the unlived life of the past which still haunts, beckoningly--is the  
subject of Henry James’s ghost story The Jolly Corner, published in  
1908, whose protagonist, Spencer Brydon, returns to his childhood home  
after more than thirty years abroad. Brydon begins to believe that his  
alter ego—the ghost of the man he might have been, had he not left at  
23 for a life abroad—is haunting the "jolly corner," his nickname for  
the old family house. His early years become a “morbid obsession” for  
Brydon.

“He found all things come back to the question of what he personally  
might have been, how he might have led his life and “turned out,” if  
he had not so, at the outset, given it up.”

His speculations are, as he admits, a result of the habit of “vain  
egoism,” of “too selfishly thinking,” the same curiosity—natural and  
perhaps universal—that fuels the popularity of Facebook, which is  
certainly founded on narcissism. Rather than accepting this as a  
pejorative cliché, however, we should stop a moment to recall that a  
reasonable amount of healthy narcissism is necessary in functioning  
adults, because it allows us to balance our own needs with those of  
others. Narcissus learned to see himself as an object of desire only  
when others, who fell in love with him, had taught him to do so. Like  
the self-love of Narcissus, the lives we show each other on Facebook  
are artfully constructed illusions, masquerades of the way we really  
live. We all know, privately, that we are often unhappy, that all  
relationships are difficult, that parties can be boring and marriages  
moribund. Maintaining a public self is one way to redeem our dignity,  
to keep up the illusion of faith, if not for our own sake, then for  
the sake of others. In this sense, Facebook returns the psychology of  
the self to the public realm, away from lonely solipsism and  
existential angst (I’ll keep the mask over my face, if you keep the  
mask over yours). In brief, it reinforces the relationship between  
friendship and good citizenship, reminding us that we are not alone in  
our lies.

Mikita Brottman is a psychoanalyst and chair of the program in  
humanities & depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She can  
be reached at  mbrottman at pacifica.edu