2013-03-23 - 10:52 a.m.
A Materialistic Analysis of Facebook
Like anybody else, I am a complete narcissist. Perhaps it derives from my condition�the only face I have ever recognized is my own. In fact, I have never actually looked at another person�s facebook page. What do I do when I log onto facebook for the 20th time for the day? I go straight to my home page and I try to inhabit the mind space of somebody who is looking at my homepage for the first time. What do they see? What do they think of my pics? I look pretty good in that vineyard, but damn did I gain a little weight in my tum tum on that Carmel trip? Should I post the Carmel trip, is it too �1 %�? Many a moral crisis leading to hesitation and a type of non-action has been weathered on fb.
Like any other fb addict, my self-esteem meter in now directly tied into how many likes I get on my latest apercu for the day. What, only four likes? Guess it�s a two-beer night. And that was a pretty witty Dave Barryish observation on the Light Rail this a.m.
Like Jane Goodall, who was also face blind, I have an innate capacity to watch the animals. When I go to the zoo, time passes and my zoo compatriots always rush me through. But with fb, I can go to the zoo everyday, for free, nobody rushes me and it is some fascinating birding.
Now maybe I criticize because I have always fancied myself to be just a little bit above the fray, a little beyond the reach of the hoi polloi. I�m on a different time scale then the masses who are content with frivolity of their latest dining experience and the ephemera of desires, complaints and victories that only matter to them. My competition is on the same tracks with people like Newton and Shakespeare and God knows this train is currently E.T.A. never. I am way behind schedule. Adding to the scuttlebutt and being concerned with the latest dark underbelly surfacing of the scuttlebutt only saps limited emotional energy needed for the turning out of masterworks. Volumes and tomes that will span time, ride the rails with both gentle and sudden contours of history, must tap into that deep oil essence. Take Marx for example. He discovered something rhythmic, regular, organized and patternish about history. The groups in power will always find themselves out of power and replaced by the previously dispossessed. Thinkers like the Hungarian George Lakocs, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Eagleton and other minor masters have followed that thinker on the opposite end of the ideological end�Ralph Waldo Emerson�and they seem to have taken his American advice to heart and decided to �hitch your wagon to a star.� Much of the best work of the D.W.M. (Dead white males) was written and smelling of carbon, fresh off the press in their early thirties.
Facebook is that place where people accumulate friends like either coupons or dishes. �I have 148 friends.� The form is the banking mentality that has pervaded education and other institutions. It is the mark of the liberal beast. �I have 148 friends in my computer and I have 148 dollars in the bank.� No matter what the case, historically, or ahistorically, any reader can quickly can surmise that �the subject is not exactly thriving.�
