facadebook, or, how casablanca taught me to read between the lines of facebook.

“I have an embarrassing admission to make,” a friend tells me over the phone. “I have never seen Casablanca.” “Neither have I!” I exclaim in ecstatic testimony of our similitude. Finally, I think, someone I can go and watch it with. But before my excitement can even begin to ferment, before the butterflies in my stomach set to fluttering at the thought of seeing a film I have been meaning to see for-seemingly-ever, he stops me, with a stinging, shocking phrase belied only by its brevity—“It’s in your favourites!” It is to the list of favourite films on my Facebook profile that he refers. Turns out I am the one with the embarrassing admission. His was nothing but an honest one. But the embarrassment one may imagine I would feel in that moment is completely dampened or replaced by sentiments of absolute shock and stupefaction. Why on earth would I put a film I have not seen amongst my favourites? Though, to be fair, I had sung the theme song As Time Goes By at a high school music recital once, and my untarnished memory of the lyrics once won me a piece of pie in a game of Trivial Pursuit. And along with these lyrics I knew enough other details and quotes from the movie to get me through a dinner party during which someone may have assumed I had seen it. But, there is no amount of Googleable information, no plethora of memorized lyrics or quotes that could erase or substitute for the simple truth that I had (and have!) not seen the film. And no excuse remotely acceptable to account for having put it in my favourites. What I know of Casablanca is little more than a blurb that might grace its sleeve. Turns out, face-, like any other book, shouldn’t be judged by its cover. Having criticized countless of Facebook profiles for their colourful embellishing and rigging, there was only one thing I could say to myself—“Here’s looking at you, kid.”

The Casablanca “incident” has remained an inside joke between my friend and I. I know now that every time I say I haven’t seen a film, he will facetiously suggest that I put it in my favourites. It never gets old; his sarcasm never loses its sting, and my stupefaction is always opulently renewed. However, the embarrassment of “getting caught” that day will never be as insufferable as the excruciatingly discombobulating realization that I had become one of “them”—one of the masses of people intoxicated by the 21^st century opiate that has become Facebook—the masses I had so mordantly criticized and never considered myself a possible member of. I resisted joining it for three years when I was in college, thinking it an utterly superfluous and superficial mode of communication, not to mention, a downright waste of time. Students would run through the university halls of residence to knock on my door and ask my roommate if she had seen the comment they had posted on her Facebook wall. I would think to myself, you can walk down the corridor and talk to her, you can call her on her room phone for free and talk to her, its after 9pm so you can even call her on her cellphone and talk to her for free, you can send an email to her university, Hotmail or Gmail address that will arrive before you can even make it down the corridor, but instead, you choose to write on her Facebook wall and then proceed to come over and ask her if she read it. I mean, really?

Of course, there were simple means behind this madness.  Writing on someone’s Facebook wall afforded you a luxury that no other mode of communication save for shouting it from a mountaintop allowed—everyone would see it; Facebooking is exhibitionism par excellence. Anyone who chooses to virtually graffiti somebody’s Facebook wall over dozens of other private modes of communication, can only have one motive—that everyone who walks, or rather, surfs, past that wall, will see it. And sure enough, two minutes later, there would be another knock on the door, for Person B wanted to ask my roommate if she had seen what Person A had written on her wall, and in addition what Person B had written back! I would roll my eyes in secret and continue writing my fifteen-page essay on the Kantian sublime, thinking myself much too high-minded for such petty nonsense.

­­Of course, back then, Facebook was restricted to college students in America. Having attained great success at Harvard where it was originally launched in February 2004 with the noble intention of bringing students together and fostering a university-wide online community, by autumn of the same year it had gone nationwide, opening up to almost all other American universities. For young students who had just left their homes and friends for the first time and moved away to college, it proffered the perfect mechanism for not only making new friends, but keeping in touch with old ones, as well as keeping tabs on their new ones. The courses students were taking were listed on their profiles and even though one may never have spoken to their fellow class nerd in person, no one was above sending them a Facebook message to ask what the homework was, or getting in touch with someone who had taken the course the previous semester to ask for a textbook or study notes. Facebook created the illusion that they were all friends, or could be, with the click of a button on a tab that says, “Request Friend.”

The popularity contest university students thoughts they had left behind when they graduated from high school was renewed, with burning virtual vigour. The titles of “Student Council President” or “Prom Queen,” were no longer what was sought after or recognized. Campaigns, elections and votes were hardly necessary. The new polling mechanism was very simple. The “coolest” person at university was the one with the most Facebook friends. I remember him well, and even more clearly remember the day his friend count rose to three figures. The news travelled faster than high school gossip ever had. Overnight, the guy who was commonly known as “Vegan Stephen” was re-christened as (pardon my, or their, French), “Stephen Motherfuckin’ Taylor.” The last time I remember checking after that day, he had six hundred friends, six “motherfuckin’” hundred. But Stephen Taylor was popular on Facebook for other reasons. He had a way with words; his status box, or list of activities, or section “about me,” was always filled with pure poetry. It wasn’t the usual, “I like swimming, reading and listening to music.” And so, as in high school, people copied the “cool kid,” and Facebook became not only a quest for popularity, but for originality, turning everyone into a self-proclaimed poet, philosopher or comedian.

When the photo-sharing tool was introduced in September of 2005, the popularity and originality contests grew to a new dimension. Who had been to the coolest new year’s party, who had spent Spring Break in Puerto Rico, who had met and taken photos with somebody famous—this became the intrigue du jour. But it didn’t even have to be that grand, cool, or far away. They could have been photos of an ordinary get-together in a dingy, old dorm room. What was important was that you looked like you were having the time of your life. I had never seen such big smiles, such displays of ecstasy, drug-induced or otherwise, as I began to see posted on Facebook. It wasn’t enough to have a lot of friends. You had to have a lot of fun too. Leaving college parties, you would almost always hear the words, “put those photos up on Facebook!” being shouted in between goodbyes. And sure enough, they would be up before dawn. Students who were previously knocking to inquire about wall-posts were now busily uploading photos onto Facebook, some going to the lengths of actually taking photos for Facebook, others going even further to edit them, need I say it, for Facebook. Of course, following the posting of photos came captioning, tagging and commenting. As if that huge smile wasn’t enough to prove that you are one big ball of fun, you had to add a funny caption, or comment, to which your friend would then reply, and so on and so forth. And all the better if it was some cryptic inside joke in a coded language that no one else could understand. So not only did the photos say, “Look at me! I am having fun,” they said, “I’m laughing and I won’t tell you why.”

Towards the end of my third year however, Facebook, like any other American product that had seen success, had gone worldwide. Succumbing to the umpteenth urge from one of my friends to join it “in case I might find friends I had lost touch with,” I sat down one night to give it a try. And suddenly, as I confirmed my registration on Facebook, there they all were, or a lot of them, the click of a button away. The ones I had often thought of, or wondered about, the ones I had completely forgotten, and the ones I cared not one bit for. My American friends had been excited by the notion of finding friends online they hadn’t seen since last year’s high school prom. I found friends I hadn’t seen since we sat in our knickers in a sandbox. It was one big virtual yearbook, and before I knew it, I was back in high school. Or rather, at one big virtual reunion. As is the case with most reunions, on the surface lies a spattering of grown-up catch-up—where are you now, what have you been up to, congratulations on your baby girl, sympathies for the loss of your father, and so on. Below the surface however, we are all still high school students at just another recess, wanting to know who’s who and who’s with who, who has come out of the closet, and who should.

I may have been too high-minded for the ecstasy of communication that was played out in the dormitory corridors, but I couldn’t say that I was above the basic human instinct of curiosity, that I didn’t revel in some flattery, and that I didn’t have a little high school student deep inside me desperate to make her ex-boyfriend jealous, or sorry that he had lost her, regardless of how much time had gone by or to what smithereens any previous sentiments had shrivelled. And dare I say, I don’t know many people who are. Anyone who has and perhaps even hasn’t attended high school, retains some of that soap-operatic sensibility. We are all yearning to hear, or do, something that inspires that two-word reaction that is so definitively “high school” – “no way!” And what’s more, even if we recognize this, we will revert to a high-school justification—“everyone’s doing it!” Almost literally, everyone. Facebook recently reported over 200 million active users. “Everyone and their mother,” as they say. Even mine.

In the beginning, she kept saying “I’m too old for this.” Now she calls me from another continent and spends ten minutes reading her newsfeed to me. I used to complain because she’d call to ask me if I was eating enough or if I had brushed my teeth. Now she calls to tell me who else is brushing their teeth. Great. Young or old, it seems we all retain the subconscious desire to stay in school, not so much for the classes, as for the news-feeding recesses in between. And fortunately, for the typical, modern-day office worker, Facebook paved the ideal yellow-brick road back to high school, for most, if not all, employees find themselves in front of a computer screen (if they are lucky, with no one behind them). And the real world work they have—putting data into spreadsheets, compiling contracts, cold-calling, whatever it may be—could hardly be as interesting as the Facebook profile of someone who is listed as “no longer in a relationship,” or fantastic photographs from some barely known “friend’s” recent trip to Acapulco. The back of the computer screen is the ultimate sham façade; the intensity of the user’s gaze would appear to suggest he is “hard at work,” while behind the ruse, the only work he is doing is editing his Facebook status to say that he is “hard at work.” There are few things more oxymoronic, or moronic, than a Facebook status that reads “busy at work.” “Bored,” “distracted”…perhaps, but not busy.

It is no wonder then, that it has been banned from many offices worldwide. Facebook presents the perfect antidote to work, in the perfectly deceptive “seems like work” form. But that people can be, or are, bored and distracted at work is an age-old concept. Desk jobs have always been and will always be, in many cases, less than captivating. And that people choose not to do them, or do other things to keep themselves engaged, is not a product of Facebook; Melville’s Bartleby chose the much more simplistic route of stubbornly repeating his infamous “I’d prefer not to”. The difference however, between Bartleby and the modern day office-Facebooker, is that Bartleby didn’t feel the need to shout his idleness (or industriousness, for that matter) from the mountaintops, to publicize and advertise it, and make it known to hundreds of  “friends.” Lord knows, had Facebook existed in Bartleby’s time, he’d have had one and only one response to the notion of changing his status or commenting on somebody else’s—“I’d prefer not to.”

And lately, I have come to share Bartleby’s sentiments. To put it in high-school terms, Facebook is so five minutes ago…dot com! I found it interesting in the beginning. It made me, for a moment, believe that I was still in the sandbox, and all the friends I had ever had were sitting around me. We were building castles and throwing sand at each other. Of course this was the way my subconscious painted it. The reality was that we were building virtual relationships based on nothing but façades, and the sand we were throwing at each other was faux-happiness—airbrushed, poeticized, nit-picked, deep-fried and sugar-coated nuggets of our lives and selves—with the intention of feeding each other’s green-eyed monsters and our own insatiable ego, not the noble one of “reconnecting.” The truth is, of the three hundred odd friends I reconnected with through Facebook, I daresay that any of them grew any closer to me, or any more important, than they had been fifteen years ago before we had Facebook or even email. In fact, the notion that we were only one click away from contact with each other and yet neither of us clicked that button, exposed to me the triviality, if not utter falsity, of our so-called “friendship.”

The people I consider friends are the ones who know what is going on in my life regardless of whether or not it appears in the status box on my profile page. They are the ones who call, or come to see me, the ones I go and have a drink with, not the ones who send me a virtual martini. If only those virtual drinks had been a little more intoxicating, perhaps I never would have had the clarity of sight to see through this shallow screen. Though, I don’t deny – virtual intoxication too, clearly has its merits, for few of us realize exactly how affected, addicted, or shallow we may have become. “My grandmother had a stroke” hardly makes for such interesting dinner conversation as “My grandmother is on Facebook” nowadays. Needless to say, I threaten to leave dinner parties when people start talking about Facebook. Surely we can find other things to talk about, no? Anyone seen Casablanca?

I still have not. But I do still remember the lyrics of the theme song. And until I can say that I have seen the movie, I will relegate to calling the song a favourite, for the message “As Time Goes By” conveys, is truly timeless:

You must remember this/ A kiss is still a kiss/ A sigh is just a sigh/ The fundamental things apply/ As time goes by/ And when two lovers woo/ They still say I love you/ On this you can rely/ No matter what the future brings/ As time goes by/ Moonlight and love songs never out of date/ Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate/ Woman needs man/ And man must have his mate/ That no one can deny/ Its still the same old story/ A fight for love and glory/ A case of do or die/ The world will always welcome lovers/ As time goes by.

As time goes by, technology will continue to make things faster and easier. I do not deny the utility and convenience of the internet; I now do and buy many things online that will avoid me any unnecessary travelling or queuing. But forming or fostering a friendship or relationship was never something that was inconvenient or difficult, never something you had to queue up for, never something that needed to be made any easier. “Its still the same old story, a fight for love and glory.” And I shall always prefer to fight for my love and glory in real life. If hundreds of friends are the glory I yearn for, then I can and shall make them without ever having to send them a “Friend Request.” “No matter what the future brings,” no matter what Facebook comes up with, how much closer or more real it can make that virtual connection appear, it will never bring two people close enough for a kiss, and no amount of shared photos will ever stand for, or replace, true happiness or love. Facebook, unlike moonlight and love songs, has become “out of date” for me, and perhaps will, for others. I have graduated from high school yet again, and do not feel the need to return. Of course, should I ever feel the need for a dose of artifice, pretense, or make-believe…there will always be film. Thankfully, there are many “favourites” I have not yet seen. à