The Armchair Psychology of Facebook

I read a piece by the stellar Sady Doyle on how everyone is crafting public personas now, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, et al.  What really gets me is the dichotomy of the public persona for people who aren't Snooki or Lady Gaga.  The allure of Twitter and Facebook updates and i-ate-cereal-today (apologies to Kate Harding and Al Iverson) blogs is that by allowing brief blurbs and semi-anonymous ramblings to cross our computers, we're somehow letting more and more of the words that happen in our head happen in public.  Proof: my last Facebook post:

Flash back to, say, 20 or so years ago.  If I had this same PROFOUND THOUGHT (and were still 24 as opposed to 4), I might at most call ACon and tell her about it.  Now?  Just about every acquaintance I have knows that I drank pineapple-flavored Mexican soda today.

The stream of online drivel creates a secondhand intimacy gained by little to no effort.  Before all this connectedness, if you wanted to be a friend close enough to be privy to these little jewels of insanity, you had to (1) meet me in person, (2) do so on a regular basis, (3) demonstrate through these interactions that you are not a jerk, (4) be compatible with me by virtue of shared interests and strengths, and (5) maintain a quid pro quo by revealing more and more of your actual self as I do the same.  It is organic and it takes years.  Nowadays, I have Facebook friends that I've never actually met in person; if we were to meet, that person could come to the table with extensive knowledge of how my brain works.  Like a FastPass to friendship.  The odd thing is, it doesn't seem to work that way for me.  I have a buddy who I knew through other people and good old Facebook before getting to spend any time with her in person.  When I really did get to spend time with her in person, I figured we'd have an easy time of it because we already knew a lot about each other.

...nope.  Still had lots of awkward silences toward the beginning of the conversation, still hunted-and-pecked for topics, still nosed around for that perfect springboard that would send us into meaningful interaction.

And there's the rub: we think that we're getting to know people at a safe distance through text-based communication like Facebook, Twitter and texting, but that very distance and the nature of written composition as opposed to face-to-face speech disconnects the "true" self from the cyberself.  And no matter how open you try to be over these various media, it will always be a different you than the in-person you.  Yes, I know, "the pen must at length comply with the tongue," but it doesn't.  I'm by no means lamenting the presence and influence of social networking--I love being able to see other people's random thoughts and pictures of their pets--I'm just having trouble reconciling the perceived depth of interaction online with the amount of time and effort it takes to achieve that same depth in-person, regardless of whether you "friended" them or not.

And there's no reason I should be having trouble with that concept, because I saw it happen time and again as a dating teenager.  Lemme tell ya, I was all about some AOL Instant Messenger as a teen, because the pressure was off.  I had time to craft my responses and *dazzle* my suitors with such gems as "Banana peels really aren't that slippery at all."  And those gentlemen were afforded the same advantage, which for them typically yielded sentences like, "i guess thats cool."  What happened when we went on a for-reals date?  The same thing that happens on countless for-reals dates...glorious unabashed gaucheitude.  Because the difference between how I state an idea in writing...


"My new phone is more convenient because its charger doubles as a USB cable"

and how I state it in spoken words

"My phone has this thing [flips cover off charging port] and you can, um, use the charger [points to charger] as a USB cord."

are worlds apart.  I had to pretend someone was sitting next to me and say that sentence aloud to even get it right--I can't even approximate my spoken speech on the computer.  There's a simple explanation that lies at the heart of this whole thing:

Typing takes longer than speaking, no matter how fast you type.

So even if you don't want to, even if you're really trying to be as transparent online or in text as possible, you can't really do it convincingly because the sentence springs from your brain fully formed, but morphs and changes as you type.  By the time you get to the halfway point of the sentence, you've probably already forgotten the original way it bounced out of your head.  It's your internal censor, which still operates in you even at your most relaxed and informal--it helps keep your communication coherent.  In speech, this happens when you have pauses in your sentences or use stalling syllables like "um."  You're giving yourself time to figure out how to clearly convey the idea to the listener.  You get the embryo of a thought and your brain starts buzzing, feeding you synonyms for words you aren't sure about using, informing your grammatical structure, and for most of us ladies, connecting it to eighteen other thoughts and images at the same time that you might use to enrich the thought you're in the middle of verbalizing.

The other big factor is that in text-based cyber communication, there are limits.  Not so much in blogs (as evidenced by this here entry), but especially on Twitter and in most Facebook applications.  You have to use verbal  frugality because 140 characters dries up fast.  Which means that those celebrities you're following aren't necessarily giving you a glimpse of their true selves just because they tweet, "I make awesome decisions in bike stores." (Kanye West)

So I guess what I'm trying to say in all this is that Sady is right and that the concept she's illustrating stretches even to those who aren't actively trying to censor their Facebook/Twitter out of career concerns or vanity.  Any text-based communication, open and honest though it may be, will by its very nature be a more polished version of the original speaker.  So when we tell casual acquaintances to Facebook us because we think it will take the awkward out of superficial social interaction, we are wrong.  As soon as we get face-to-face again, we'll return to wherever we were in that organic friend-making process, regardless of text-based interactions.  Which is why all the whining about texting and Facebook turning us into hermits is total crap.  We still need people, and it still takes genuine effort and vulnerability to get people.

Full disclosure: I don't have a Twitter account.  But I do regularly check the Twitter accounts of my favorite writers and celebrities.