In Praise of Messy Lives (25 page)

But clearly the “bottomless, eerie, aimless hostility” he is talking about is not only floating around bars and parties these days, but on the Internet. The nasty rumors, the lies, the blatant attacks, the vengeance circulating, the trivial and contentless nastiness breeding more, the jealousy, vanity, thwartedness finding expression. Would Mrs. C., if she ran into me at a bar, confront me, or maybe throw a drink at me? I would say probably not (though Mrs. C. may be a bit volatile, so I can’t be sure).

Of course, Mrs. C. has every right to express her opinions, and distant, long-lost acquaintances have every right to call them to my attention, in the spirit of concern or general curiosity or whatever mysterious motives animate people in tiny little moments like these. But it does make me wonder whether schadenfreude has a healthy new life on the Internet, the shadow city at war with itself.

The future of schadenfreude? I don’t know. I’ll have to consult with @icoolirock.

I have a feeling that if Andy Warhol were alive he would be spending the summer writing a novel that takes place in real time on Facebook. In that spirit, Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser have been writing a clever serialized novel on Slate called
My Darklyng
. Their innovation: the plot unfolds not just in text but on Facebook and Twitter.

For the purposes of what they affectionately call their “gonzo art project,” the veteran young-adult novelists Ms. Mechling and Ms. Moser created a fake Facebook page for their main character, sixteen-year-old Natalie Pollock. What’s fascinating is that Natalie’s page may seem fake and stilted and artificial, but only in the way all teenagers’ Facebook pages seem fake and stilted and artificial.

Which is to say “My Darklyng” offers a brilliant commentary on how fictional teenagers are on Facebook. Their stylized, mannered projections of self are as invented as any in a novel. There are regional differences, of course, to the mannerisms, but there are certain common tics: Okayyyyyyyyy. Ahhhhhhh. Everything is extreme: So-and-so “is obsessed with.” So-and-so “just
had the longest day EVERRRRRR.” They are in a perpetual high pitch of pleasure or a high pitch of crisis or sometimes just a high pitch of high pitch. Holden Caulfield might have called it “phoniness.”

A fourteen-year-old I talked to about this sent me a message that pretty much sums it up: “I write more enthusiastically on Facebook than I actually am in real life. Like if I see something remotely funny I might say ‘HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HA​HHA,’ when really there is no expression on my face.”

Another girl tells me she spends one, or maybe three, or maybe six hours a day on Facebook. She gets updates and messages to her phone during the school day, when she is not on summer vacation, hanging out on Facebook the way some people in a quaint and distant era might have hung out at a pool. It would be hard to say exactly how much time we are talking about, but suffice it to say: it’s a lot of time.

In the dark, medieval days before the Internet, teenagers were forced to scribble their stagiest experiments in selfhood in journals and notebooks, or to express themselves through their clothes. The high drama was the same, the amped-up, overstated processing of life the same, but the media available were inferior. How amazing to be able to tell your 1,344 closest friends, “Guess who I saw at the Apple store? I died it was so awkward!!!!!!!” Or “I am so freaked out and excited about tomorrow I can’t stop eating, are you experiencing this?” or “Robert in twilight is so ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Facebook gives the exhibitionism, the pure theater, of those years a whole other level of stage.

In “My Darklyng” ’s intriguing metacommentary, there is a certain cross-pollination of what might be considered real life
and fiction. Ms. Mechling and Ms. Moser hired a fifteen-year-old, Hannah Grosman, to be featured in photographs and videos for the character Natalie’s Facebook page. There are real people commenting on Natalie’s page; Hannah uses one of the photos from a photo shoot of herself as Natalie with another actress as the profile picture on her real Facebook page. A video of a kiss at the World Cup was posted on Natalie’s page just minutes before one of Hannah’s real friends posted the same thing. So it is no longer art imitating life, or life imitating art, but the two merging so completely, so inexorably, that it would be impossible to disentangle one from the other, rather elegantly making the point that these media, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, all this doodling in the ether, involve wholesale inventions of self, not projections.

One predominant fictional argot of Facebook for teenagers would be breathlessness or emphatic speech. Their pages are peppered with “Okkkkayyyyy” and “HAHAHAHA” and “OMG!!!!!” You can find polite little girls cursing like sailors on Facebook. Everything is louder, more ardent, capitalized. This is a way of dramatizing or raising the stakes on even the most inane or banal exchange: You don’t just look cute. You look soooooooooooooo cute!!!!!!! For every piece of idle communication it is as if you are stranded on a desert island, waving your arms and jumping up and down to get the attention of a passing plane.

One of the other great adolescent poses of Facebook is irony at all times. So if you say, “Can’t wait for the Lady Gaga concert,” you might add “lol,” or you might say, “Hey you are at camp and I’m in England, but I just wanted to let you know that I miss youuuu hahaha,” to make it clear that you are not really looking forward to anything or expressing an actual emotion in a way that might be overly earnest or embarrassing.

Many, especially slightly older, teenagers seem to like to parody the Facebook norms even as they embrace them. The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write “omg” you are ironically commenting on the use of “omg,” but when other people write “omg” they are seriously saying “oh my God.” This very delicate balancing act is artful, in its way. Your character is now employing the clichés of the genre, but with satire, or maybe that would be satirrrrrrrrrre.

It is, in short, a brilliant stroke to use Facebook for novel writing, because in general Facebook feeds on fiction; it consumes it, and spits it out in every direction.

Being “friends” on Facebook is more of a fantasy or imitation or shadow of friendship than the traditional real thing. Friendship on Facebook bears about the same relation to friendship in life as being run over by a car in a cartoon resembles being run over by a car in life. Facebook is friendship minus the one-on-one conversation, minus the moment alone at a party in a corner with someone (note to ninth graders: chat and messages don’t count); Facebook is the chatter of a big party, the performance of public cleverness, the façades and fronts and personas carefully crafted, the one honed line, the
esprit de l’escalier;
in short, the edited version. Do you know anything at all about your Facebook friends? Do you, in spite of the “missssssssss you girlieeeee!!!!!” and the “I cantttttt believe you are going awayyyyyyyyyy,” care about all of them? Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has framed the mission of Facebook in terms of helping “tell the story of your life.”

It should be said that adults are not necessarily less fictionalized,
or more themselves, on Facebook; they are simply less natural, less conversant, less in their element, when they fictionalize. How many people do you know who are in the midst of some great existential or marital crisis, but whose Facebook page is all family photos from the south of France, or the Vineyard, or Bangkok, and charming things their children said?

Somewhere in the gap between status posting and the person in their room at night is life itself. So fiction is the right response, the right commentary, the right point to be making about who we are in these dangerously consuming media, in these easy addictive nano-connections.

It is not, alas,
The Sun Also Rises
, but Facebook is the novel we are all writing.

A new species has risen from the shallows of the Internet: the angry commenter. Sure, there is a long tradition of inspired cranks and interested retirees who have always written letters to the editor, but something in the anonymity and speed and stamplessness of the Internet has unleashed a more powerful and uncontrolled vitriol. I am not here talking about the thoughtful, intelligent comments, which also abound, but rather the bile unloosed, flashes of fury and unexamined rage that pass as “comment.”

The commenter is justifiably angry at the encroachment on his time by the offending article. After all, since he has been tied down with rope and physically forced to read the article all the way to the end, this resentment is justified. “Why do we read this kind of drivel?” one commenter asks, and that would pretty much be the question that suggests itself. Why not just put it down, walk away? (As one non-angry commenter puts it, “The Internet is big. Go somewhere else.”) We can only conclude that there must be part of the ritual that the angry commenter enjoys,
some small thrill in hating something and being able to voice how resentful he is of the precious time that article has robbed him of.

Now, it’s easy to see how one might disagree with or dislike an article, but what is more bewildering and bears examination is the response of
hating the writer’s guts
. One would think, reading some of these comments, that the writer has done something to the commenter, that there has been some deep personal transgression. One suspects one thing the writer has done is be the writer, and the commenter feels unfairly ghettoized in the comments section, and feels secretly, well, not so secretly, that she should be writing the article, and the
writer
should be commenting. Like, let her see what it’s like to be tied down and forced to read an article from beginning to end.

There are several common fantasies about the writer that fly through comments sections. One is that the writer is “privileged,” and/or getting rich off of the insipid and offending article. The confidence and specificity of this fantasy is interesting. One commenter claims that a writer “typifies the white, middle-upper class man who attends Harvard.… This is because of his race and class privilege. To him, no one really has access to the ‘old boys’ network’ or is thinking too much about jockeying for social position. That’s because he is a de-facto member of the old boys’ network and already has his social position.” One Slate commenter asserts that a writer “can afford to work only sporadically”; another asserts that she “pulled herself up by her manolo blahnik bootstraps,” and yet another that the article is enabling her to put more polish “on her Mercedes.” Assuming the commenter does not live next door to the writer and is not the writer’s sister or best friend, one wonders a little how the commenter
is quite so confident about the content of the writer’s bank account. Especially since most freelance writers for places like Slate are not exactly paying the rent on the penthouse off their efforts. If the writer has come from a place of privilege—and as in the rest of the world, some have and some haven’t—they are most likely frittering away whatever they do have by entering an insecure and unlucrative profession like writing. These demographic realities, though, make little impression on the angry commenter, who, one notes admiringly, sticks to her guns.

We are clearly in a season of class war, and one can understand the class war against a hedge-fund guy, but a
writer
? This is, in other words, a class war Mao or Ho Chi Minh could get behind. In fact, it’s possible that Mao or Ho Chi Minh living today would
be
angry commenters.

It’s also interesting that the angry commenter comes fairly equally from the right, from the left, and from some other apolitical place of rage. Though I haven’t admittedly done a scientific study, it’s my impression that angry commenters are a little harder on women writers than male writers, for reasons I am not sure of, though angry commenters themselves are both male and female.

One of the offshoot pleasures of angry commenting seems to be getting angry at the other angry commenters. There is an element of what one might call socializing, a sort of happy hour of nastiness and sniping. Is this joyful little flash of human friction and fraternizing the best they can hope for? As one non-angry commenter writes to some other angry commenters: “I’m sorry your life is so empty that you find it necessary to try and pick fights with random strangers on the Internet.”

This raises the question of whether the commenter is basically
normal in her daily life. Maybe she is a schoolteacher who is sweet to kindergartners during the day, and then on a Sunday afternoon secretly releases her anger at the unsuspecting world? Is the person who writes “Move out of the city—seriously—there are too many of you idiot—think you are so sophisticated and special—narcissistic personality disordered yahoos already here I could puke” perfectly polite to the old lady blocking his way in a drugstore aisle? My guess is that the angry commenter is functional, loving, and peaceable in his daily life, and it is only in the comments section that his darkest fury is unleashed (though I could be wrong). In this model one could argue that comments sections are fulfilling an important social function, a kind of collective unconscious that allows the commenter to voice and play out their worst impulses so they can be civilized in their actual lives.

It is possible, though, that there is just more bitterness out there than we realized before the Internet brought us closer to people’s rawest, quickest, uncensored thoughts. (That rooting around for a stamp, the walk to the mailbox through the fresh air, the name at the bottom of the letter, did seem to have a mitigating effect on expressions of blind hatred.)

Of course, I am all for everyone’s right to express themselves (though it can be more effective to spell and use words correctly). Snobbism is actually one of the commenters’ favorite bugaboos, and it is considered snobbish among many angry commenters to prefer that words be spelled or used correctly, spelling and standard written English being a construct of the wealthy, and anyway kind of a show-offy part of the writer’s “privilege.” We all do have spell-check on our computers, so clearly if the angry commenter wanted to, she could spell correctly too, but spelling
correctly would be giving in to the whole hierarchy, namely the idea that some things might be more interesting to read than other things, that has angered her in the first place.