By Ben Mullin
If Facebook has its numbers straight, I have exchanged 52,188 messages with a friend I knew in person for just 10 days, two years ago.
Our correspondence, which could fill several badly-edited books, took me in and out of love, through the end of high school and into college. It”s a more complete and detailed history of my life than exists anywhere else, including my own memory.
Sixty years from now, if I could somehow prevent my wrinkled index finger from snapping off from fatigue, I could scroll through uncountable pages of 12 point Times New Roman text and remember exactly what it was like to be 17 and twitterpated, before the word twitterpated became hip e-slang for writer”s block on Twitter. And if our correspondence endures 60 years of incessant, arthritis-inducing typing, the history of my entire life will be spelled out online, in 120-character chunks.
And I won”t be the only one. According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the social networking giant has more than 500 million active users, and it”s “almost a guarantee” that Facebook will eventually have one billion registered users. Roughly one-seventh of the human race will be online daily, writing about their lives.
Poets, engineers, scientists, politicians and laypeople are every day building the most powerful tool humans have for understanding each other, one status update at a time: A complete written history of the human race in the modern age.
And judging from the types of things that are said on Facebook, we each seem to realize we”re custodians of that history. Barring brief bouts of caps lock and indecipherable grammar, the things people write on Facebook are generally kinder and better thought-out than the things they say in real life.
This is partially because the act of writing forces people to slow down and chew over exactly what they want to say, but it also has to do with the kind of place Facebook is.
At its core, Facebook is a place where we each construct a stand-in for ourselves, sometimes based only loosely on who we actually are.
Every Facebook user gradually creates an idealized version of themselves by changing their profile picture, parsing their word, and choosing who and what they pay attention to.
The society that we have a complete written history for is largely an ideal one, populated by ideal people.
The good news about Facebook is that the human race gets to choose how we will be remembered. The bad news is we might not remember ourselves correctly.
Ben Mullin is a Lake County native and an English/journalism student attending California State University, Chico. He will spend his summer as a contributor to the Record-Bee.
