We're All Doomed: Facebook's Giant Reality Show

You probably haven’t heard anything about this at all, except on the Internet, but there’s a new Facebook layout coming out. The mainstream media usually doesn’t put much of a spotlight on social media stuff, and blogs never pick it up, not wanting to regurgitate the same junk all day, but this new Facebook thing is kind of a big deal.

And it’s not because of the layout (pictures are bigger, "poke" button is gone, new column on the right). It’s the site’s new “Timeline,” which aims to put everything you read, listen to, and watch into a neat stream that can be shared with all of your friends, and bring everything that’s in your real world into the pretty and orderly and super-public giant world of Zuck. Tim Wu can tell you why one company owning your media environment is not so great. But what does this mean for the time-honored tradition of Facebook stalking?

You know what the best part of Facebook has been up until now, besides drunkenly begging minor acquaintances to come over in the middle of the night? Watching people you knew and detested in high school complain about their miserable, awful lives. And that’s kind of OK and understandable, considering that most people don’t put too much of themselves online. And if they do, it’s not really them, it’s practically an avatar. So you’re only laughing maniacally at the person they’re projecting. That person usually loves to post status updates about weed, local grindcore bands, and their feelings concerning the newest episode of Glee. People just prattle on and on about what they’re eating or the fact that it’s Friday.

That self-absorbed idiocy is pretty par for the course online, but it also might be a serious sociological problem. A study conducted in 2008, “We’re All Stars Now: Reality Television, Web 2.0 and Mediated Identities,” sees it as an odd side-effect of the social media explosion. According to the study:

Heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they also have larger social networks, share more photos and are more likely to engage in “friendships” with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending.

Mark Zuckerberg announced his new “open graph” timeline yesterday— and nothing else important really happened. The Facebook “timeline” is Zuckerberg’s attempt to map out your whole life so that other people (and, surprise, advertisers) can see it. “We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life,” said Zuck.

What he could have said was, “We think it’s an even better way to derive twisted joy from watching the people you went to high school with blow out their knees and drink away scholarships or get pregnant. Or, conversely, a path to utter depression inspired by seeing a stream of photos of exes smiling on beaches or making out with their new boyfriends.” This is the best schadenfreude crack den or the worst machine for self-pity.

If it ever existed, the Berlin wall that separated our real and online identities is falling before Zuckerberg’s (and Google’s, and Silicon Valley’s) demands to tear it down. In the holes that are appearing, there’s a lot more to see of other people – and a lot more of yourself to warp and submit to the mercy of the internet. And for all the talk about privacy, it’s not like Internet people are learning how to build better personal boundaries, or be more sensitive to other people’s privacy. C’mon dudes, that’s just not social. As they said on MTV, It’s high time to stop being polite and start getting real.

Now we have a better way to indulge our ancient desire to share details about ourselves with our friends (and trolls – not to malign them, I love what they do). And a new way to satisfy our desire to gawk at people destroying their lives in front of us. Schadenfreude as a word is relatively new, but the concept is pretty universal. There's a Buddhist word, mudita, that is used to express happiness in others' sorrow. English has the phrase "Roman Holiday," which roughly covers the same idea (even though I’ve never heard of it before). There's a word for it in most cultures. It's pretty integral to the human experience.

Interesting anecdote: I once watched a young woman have a complete emotional breakdown on the floor of a bar where I was attending a tumblr meet-up. She had to be forcibly removed by a bouncer, as she shrieked and clawed like a cat going into anaphylactic shock. I was horrified, but it was also kind of fascinating. Does that make me a sociopath? Yes, without a doubt. But everyone else was looking on with the same kind of demented awe. Are we all sociopaths?

At the heart of most reality TV is a really strange desire to watch other people do stuff. Which is weird, and possibly a psychosexual personality disorder. But it's also very human. Deep down we want to know what everyone else is doing. We want to make sure we have the best home to store the best food to feed the best children that we can make with our best mate.

And because of that there’s a twisted, ironic joy from watching ghost hunting third generation Italian Americans smoke Oxycontin and bang each other inside of their trashed-filled hovels while their horrible children dress up in disgusting costumes and compete against dance crews in a modeling contest judged by a transvestite millionaire that fights whalers in the swamps of Louisiana (note to self: I need to produce that show).

The longest marathon of reality TV I've ever sat through was about nine hours of 16 & Pregnant on a Sunday afternoon. I blame that partly on being hungover, but mostly it was because I really get a kick out of watching sexy teenagers ruin their lives.

Sidenote, not that I've ever tried it, but if you get a chance, try marijuana while watching Intervention. It causes a sense of superiority that is truly unparalleled. Not that I've ever tried it. But that kind of leads to my point: we are all becoming voyeurs.

Digital voyeurism is more and more accepted as the line between what’s entertainment and what’s reality gets fuzzy. The key difference with something like Facebook’s timeline is that it’s trying to go back in time. It’s trying to claim the precious pre-Facebook life events that were never uploaded into Facebook’s database. Once I get the timeline I’m going to have to have a very serious conversation with myself about whether or not I’m going to make up an entire fake life.

So. How is this going to pan out?

Zuckerberg succeeds in creating the social layer of the internet. He makes social connective tissue and wraps it around the nervous system of inter-linking databases that most people use to look at pictures of cats. He initiates a new stage in the evolution not only of the Internet but of the world, making human communication more intuitive, and more importantly, more human. All the complaining we’re doing now gets transmuted to some new technological “advance”; social networking becomes part of our lives, like looking at advertisements and inhaling coffee. Pop some champagne bottles, we’re living in the future.

We all embrace the Facebook, uploading terabytes of personal data into a massive public archive. Facebook stalking has all the real-life implications of real stalking, as we watch and follow each other’s lives. The lines between entertainment and real life disappear, as people use social media to broadcast whatever they want. Criminals like thieves and murders are followed online, given TV shows, endorsement deals as we as a culture begin to lose grip of reality. A world where everyone’s a celebrity and anything can be entertaining leads to murders and suicides for fun as advertisers monitor in-depth metrics on what we view and how. Our social lives are put in digital pens that lie to us and tell us that we are all stars.

Then, finally – as we all fatten up and consume, driven by behavioral advertising convincing us Hot Pockets are the only food we need to eat – using nostalgically mined details of our histories, Zuckerberg announces the last step. Tearing off his fleshy human mask, he reveals he comes from a planet were social skills never evolved and he’s been using Facebook as a way to understand how humans interact to teach to the population of his planet (and its biggest advertisers). But also, his race is going to eat us. No one notices of course, because we’re all too busy posting about how great it is that it’s Friday, or complaining about a newly rolled-out feature.