Facebook’s baroque surfaces are a taunt; the envy one feels as a result is not an incidental personal weakness, it is intrinsic to the structure of the form. It is a form that loves the flamboyant displays of half-truths, and encourages half-truth commentaries to float around them. No individual moment on Facebook, no photo or comment or “like” is any more artificial, any more derivative, than innumerable moments that have accompanied me otherwise, as I, along with the rest of you, have been dragged through a world not always able to organize the trenchancy of expression apposite to its condition of love and suffering. But Facebook, I will insist, is a literary genre. As such it is a cognitive mode, a consciousness-for-hire in which the mind can swim. And it is on these terms that I call it out. It is not its artificial moments, of the kind I live out every day, but its artificial mode, that would steal from me my mind’s meditative, contemplative force, my Puritan spirit—my life lived as a better novel.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 11:32:45 +0000
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