Why My Facebook Movie Sucked

I avoided Facebook for a few years when it first became a craze. Frankly, there are people who I didn't want to connect with, and I certainly didn't care to tell the world What Was On My Mind because I was not in a good place.

Like most people, my relationship is love/hate. I love the way I can interact with distant cousins and internet friends who I would have otherwise lost track of because, let's face it, I'm not big on phone calls and its nice to be able to drop them a PM occasionally without having a two hour conversation. That may sound like a hollow relationship but it's better than no relationship at all and it often does lead to two hour phone conversations or longer emails.

I began to hate the way Facebook prompted me to share my every thought and life event with all those people. I'm increasingly uncomfortable sharing my life one out of context picture at a time to be seen by whoever wanders on for a moment that day, only to have it buried under commentary about Obama or Justin Bieber the next. Maybe it's my growing health problem, but I've come to value some of these candid moments in a way that makes me want to hoard them for myself.

Which leaves me without much to say on FB unless I engage in political and religious debate, and that is a temptation I am seldom able to resist. My views on those topics have come after many long and difficult years of testing them out, revising them, and even suffering for them. So I feel strongly. Conversely I am given to snarkiness and satire, which makes my posts about these topics seem flippant and reactionary when I intend them to be anything but. Since most FB readers have a short attention span, I'm forced to cram what should be a 30 minute discussion with context into a two sentence comment. It's a bad combination which has painted me as a grumpy, loud mouthed jerk who speaks before he thinks. If you know me in real life, I only tend toward that occasionally (I hope). I think about things deeply but am inclined to do so out loud when I haven't quite got it figured out. This is a formula for hurt feelings and arguments on Facebook.

So in trying to avoid all of the above I'm left with commenting on geek culture and short updates about my health. Boring.

So my Facebook Movie was put together last week, I presume, by the good folks who run the site. But when I watched it, it didn't look like a movie of my life at all. There were none of the heart wrenching failures and losses, none of the elated victories and sense of accomplishment that has characterized the last four years of my life. No mention of finishing The Phantom Tollbooth with two delighted boys. No coming to an understanding with a new dog that I struggled to accept because our previous dog left an aching hole in our lives that will never be filled. No memories of my boys tousled hair when they slept in too late, their joys and sorrows. No coming to terms with my anger about old grievances and finding peace. Nothing about the ongoing kindness of strangers in our lives. No victory lap for my wife and I as we conquered obstacles that would have landed most couples in divorce court. None of that was there. And that has been my life over four years.

Facebook got it wrong because I refused to share myself with it on any meaningful level. I wonder how true that is for my friends and family who are often put off by my FB comments that come from years of examination of what I believe to be true and real in this life, and far more experience than any 43 year old should rightfully have. There is no way to convey all of that in three sentences and a picture and is therefore easy to dismiss as ranting or emotion. Either way, that stuff isn't my life. It may define me to a point, but my life is so much more than anything I can fit on FB and more than I can express in the time most people give a typical FB post. It is more than a funny meme or a passing quiz to find out which Star Wars character I am (Anakin).

I guess that's why I have a blog. Maybe I should start using it more instead of trying to make empty points that don't come off as I intend in the first place. That's not a resolution but a realization that Facebook is what it is. And for all its immediacy and cleverness it still doesn't know me, and it's impossible for anyone else to know me through it. That job is still mine and I have to do better than memes and cheap shot political commentary. I promise I'll try.

P.S. Also that's not the music of my life's movie. How about In My Life by The Beatles or Right Now by Van Halen? Or even Live Forever by Queen, or Die With Your Boots On by Maiden? Wrong, wrong, wrong.