I am a Facebook Voyeur

by Madeleine Kando

I admit it, I am a Facebook voyeur. I waste my precious time on Facebook because there are a few faces amongst the millions that matter to me, like my daughter Aniko. She lives far away, you see. She leads her life in the mist of distance, so I like to get a peek every so often, especially now that she gave me a grandson.

But I don’t often post things on Facebook and I am sure I am not the only voyeur out there. Let’s face it, Facebook is a huge sniffing ground. This is how my little chihuahua must feel when she enters the doggy park.

There are brown dogs, black dogs, little dogs, squashed-nosed dogs, biting dogs, peeing dogs.. you name it, and they’ll eventually appear in the park. When another canine approaches her, she either ignores him or tries to bite him. She is a dog-snob, you see, just like I am a Facebook-snob. But every once in a while she will lose all sense of self-respect and start panting, yelping, prancing in circles around the newcomer and show clear signs of wanting to physically bond. Other than trying to bite my husband, these encounters give meaning to her existence.

Most of the time, however, my chihuahua (actually she is a Chiweeni, a cross between a chihuahua and a dachsund, which makes her look like a sausage with big ears), spends her time in the doggy-park trying to mark as much territory by peeing and pooping. Just like people who post the most on Facebook, she is enamored with the smell of her own anal excretions. Have you noticed that in your friends’ stream it’s always the same relatively small group of people that beep their horn over and over again?

Some ‘friends’ place their parcels right in your face, purely for self-promotion. They are too stingy to create their own websites or too dense to understand the difference between a ‘friend’ and a ‘customer’. Others still have an irrational desire to excrete every tiny little turd, so we have the honor of sharing what they had for breakfast or what kind of color nail polish goes with their favorite outfit. They have an intense need to share banalities because the concept of ‘priorities’ has disappeared from their vocabulary.

Facebook is like an oil spill that expands further and further into the space in our lives that was reserved for reflection, to think about things. As Chris Hedges writes in an article called ‘How to Think’, ‘reflection can only thrive in solitude’. The desire to be seen and heard has drowned out our need for privacy. It is based on collective madness, on a collective distortion of what is important in our culture. It responds to the law of least resistance, like a vast playground where we can pretend to be doing something useful, but where originality, imagination and the ability to think deeply are stifled. How can you reflect when you are concerned about how many ‘friends’ you have? Does looking at photos of drinking, partying narcissists, sticking out their tongues at the camera inspire to find a solution to our crumbling infrastructure, to reflect on climate change, or our enslavement to corporate power?

As every self-respecting chihuahua can tell you, you have to be selective with what you sniff, or you risk drowning in the shit out there. One of these days, like a park with too many dogs taking a dunk, wherever, whenever and however they please, Facebook will become so unbearably nauseating that I, for one, will have to wear a face mask before I enter. If at all. leave comment here