“Why do things always have to be fake on the internet?”

I’ve heard this complaint over and over and over again. They say that people aren’t “real” on their facebook/myspace/xanga/blogger/you name it. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“Welcome to hell…err…facebook”
“Welcome back to our wonderful world of friends and facades”
“You looked better on your myspace picture”

It seem like we are overrun by sparkly profiles, and deluded with gaudy applications. Instead of taking time to find commonalities with friends we figure out which Lord of the Rings character we’re most like. Our entourage 35 deep, our friendship shallow, and our interests, music, and movies section have become applications to a popularity contest.

Why do we behave this way? I believe no other person has summed this problem up better than a good friend of mine:

“I’m here because I have an addiction to attention”

Ahh…yes…our drive to be significant, to be valued, and to be wanted. It can be vicious, but shall we say that drive is a petty thing? Yes this drive does cause us to do ridiculous things as I have mentioned above, but I do not think that is the problem. As a galaxy without a star, or a landscape without a single blade of grass, so to are our lives without significance or value from another being. There is nothing but random sound in a conversation if devoid of relationship. I might even go as far to say that relationships are the very essence of life.

Does the mean we have failed at life? Is so…bummer.

(This next this though is rather abstract but bear with me.)

Maybe it’s because we have lost “ourselves”. It’s the paradoxical thought that “If you lose yourself you’ll find it, and if you grasp or seize yourself you’ll be lost”

In the garden of Eden man and woman reached out so seize the object of godhood. “For then you will be like God, knowing good and evil”. Once they laid their hands on the fruit of their desire, the horrible affect took place immediately. The object laid its hands on tehm, and the “self” (which was innocent, like God at the time) was unselfed. Not fulfilled or filled but emptied. The apple grew into a god, and man shrunk into its slave.

“A man is a slave to whatever he cannot part with, that is less than himself.”
-George McDonald

In a very similar way I think we have tried to find our identity in something less than ourselves through internet socializing websites. We devote ourselves to possessing that object (I.E. attention), and so we are possessed by our possession.

“Well, James, if you hate facebook and myspace so much why don’t you just delete your account?” My friend it is not the internet site that I hate, rather it is the force that has taken hold of us through it. I do not believe the internet is an evil that corrupts our ability to be genuine by turning us into facades, rather I think we have lost ourselves completely because we have tried to grasp selfhood by means of profile views/comments.

So what are we to do with this addiction to attention? Perhaps the answer is on the other side of the paradox…We must lose ourselves to truly be found…now…as to what that looks like I don’t know. I speculate it will look different for every person.

-James

p.s.

This is not a note telling everyone to delete their facebook/myspace account.