On Facebook, or the Art of Introductions

Published February 20, 2007

By Elias Altman

During the winter of 1887, Vincent Van Gogh, the original mad-genius bohemian, convinced fellow avant-garde painter Paul Gauguin, the brilliant colorist who traded Paris for Polynesia, to co-found an artists’ colony in southern France.Before moving down to Arles, they decided to exchange paintings as a form of introduction. They each sent the other a self-portrait.

Even though the experiment in communal living eventually failed (Van Gogh sliced off his ear, as you know, and Gaugin escaped civilization via Tahiti), the two were prolific during their shared time. Van Gogh painted many of his most famous works then, like his first attempt at a “ Starry Night” — your roommate has it in its final form.

I like how they began their relationship with the exchange of deeply personal information: self-portraits. As painters, they must have stared at each other — through their painted surrogates — for hours at a time, tring to understand what lay beneath.

Nowadays, we partake in a similar experience on a daily basis: Facebooking. Facebook profiles, like self-portraits, allow us to re-present ourselves in a way of our choosing. We become scheming advertisers peddling the most important products of all: ourselves.

Our Facebook decisions reflect different styles in self-representation: some of us are chronic list-makers, others extensive quote-droppers or constant-updaters. I believe less is more — a little information goes a long way — as long as the “less” is enough to show that I like philosophical books and properly obscure rock n’ roll bands.

But, also like an abstract painting, Facebook allows the viewer multiple interpretations: Is she really looking for random play or just kidding? Is he really that drunk all the time? We learn to decode these social signifiers and they help us form an opinion about the person in question.

I have often found myself engaged in Seinfeld-like dialogues, internally or with a friend, about a detail of someone’s profile. The detail either reinforces infatuation or solidifies disgust: “She listed: ‘anything I can do an interpretive dance to’ under music — isn’t that sweet?” or “That fuckhead doesn’t know the first thing about Hamlet.”

Facebook, like all things on the internet, increases the flow of information. In this case, it is personal information. Thus, Facebook constitutes a totally new mode of social relations. It is simultaneously intimate and distant. I can look at sixty photos of the cute girl I met for thirty seconds at that party — I have — yet, there is no real interaction.

Perhaps, it is too much information, a sensory overload. Never before have we been able to contemplate so many photographs of someone before we get to know them — what an extended introduction! We become spies and the voyeur in us is happy. As we carefully fashion, or refashion, ourselves on Facebook, we grow adept at judging others.

Facebook, like knowing how to split the atom, is a double-edged sword. It inserts information into our brain like an IV tube. Maybe the poet William Wordsworth was right when he wrote, “The world is too much with us” — I know Van Gogh would have agreed with him.

Print This Article

Comments