I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg planned to topple the Nixon/Regan Conservative coalition when he created Facebook as a social utility for college students. I don’t think he knew that his little experiment in cyber-social-voyuerism would lead to a political sea change in American thought and ideology. His aims were probably far more benign… post up some pictures of yourself and your friends, hook up with other folks, and close the gaps between people in their daily lives.
But a funny thing happened on the way to aspirational interconnectedness… the 2008 election.
You see, in the past, presidential elections and the political structure in America was dominated by the overarching notion of creating a dynamic of “us” versus “them”… The us being people who you identified with from your social circle, a pastiche of people with a common background, geography, ethnicity, education, or profession that were easy to partition and corral by base level commonality. The them were the others who we only knew from the outside and interacted with through neccessity, without delving into much of who that were, but rather what they were… not like us, not from our city or town, not having gone to our school, not working in the same place we do, and not looking like us. It was easy to created cleavages based on these differences because we all we knew was the difference between us and them.
And then there was Facebook.
However intrusive or invasive one may find the website, one cannot deny its ubiquitous ability to connect people who seemingly should have nothing in common at all. Everyone seems to have a Facebook page and with it, everyone has exposed just enough about themselves for all of us to see past the surface and get a sense of what lies beneath.
Name.
Age.
Gender.
Hometown.
Current City.
Interested In.
Religious Views.
Political Affiliation.
All used by identity politicians to drive a wedge between Americans plainly placed on display as common currency of social interaction. So the secrets and pretense of identity give way to the actual name and face of the person who identifies with it. However casual your interaction with someone you claim as a friend on Facebook, you can still run the gambit of social identifiers and philosophy just by browsing through your list of contacts. Its a beautiful thing, really. While I may not have an entre’ in your life or your lifestyle, I can get a sense of what its like from browsing your Facebook page.
Black people ski.
Gay people have birthday parties for their partners.
Muslims have play dates.
White people play Wii.
Republicans have some pretty live happy hours.
All of these things I learned browsing Facebook pages of my friends, and by doing so, a misconception I may have formed about a group of people gets thrown by the wayside. Its hard to marginalize someone as being a “them” when there are pictures of said them and their grandmother eating ice cream or a newsfeed story announcing the birth of their new nephew. Facebook has become a democratizing force because the wedge doesn’t work when you actually like the people they tell you are your enemy.
So, when the old political game of being pro something or anti something else gets trotted out, its hard to believe the hype because you can browse through your friends list and find out that someone you know and admire is actually one of “them” and they’re really not so bad after all.
I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg knew that he was changing the paradigm of interaction between communities by creating the uber-community… I think he was just looking for a way for friends to connect with friends… But what’s most interesting about this experiment is that, its opened the shades on a lot of people’s homes and allowed passers by to just stare in for a while, and in doing so, the fear of the unknown is washed away.
When the Lee Atwater and Karl Rove types try to tell you there’s something wrong with “those” people, remember
Black people ski.
Gay people have birthday parties for their partners.
Muslims have play dates.
White people play Wii.
Republicans have some live happy hours.
And that’s why we don’t have to hate one another because we don’t always agree. We’re all one nation, under Facebook, indivisible… I think we’re a better country for it.
