The Nervous Breakdown

None of this is to say that we don’t use Facebook, as Franzen asserts, to make our lives look more interesting, touting new infants, new jobs, and new books. But it goes both ways. We also confess to watching bad reality television, to eating our weight in potato chips, to trading crops on Farmville when we should be grading papers. We fight in whole paragraphs about politics and religion. We post pictures of our dogs sleeping, of our messy apartments, of our feet. More often than not, there is a complete picture there, a real-time history of living. Facebook has less replaced the real world than it has compressed it, collecting the messy stuff of our existence into photos, links, and status updates. As Alexis Madrigal writes in response to Zadie Smith’s Facebook critique, “While some things can be shaped by the tool itself, by the software, others are burned in by the much longer game of being alive in the world.”

via www.thenervousbreakdown.com