Here's an idea--
without Facebook,
you might not know who you are.
[THEME MUSIC]
Since we're pretty confident you
already know what Facebook is,
we're going to spend this
part of the episode looking
at photos from my
recent trip to Portland.
[MUSIC - "DREAM OF THE '90S"]
What you might not know, though,
is how big Facebook really is.
As of a few months ago,
the social media monolith
had over 955 million
worldwide users.
And of those, 552 million
of them are active daily.
For comparison, that is roughly
the populations of the United
States, Australia,
the United Kingdom,
Spain, Germany,
and Italy combined.
And not one of them
knows what poking does.
All of these people are
uploading 250 million photos
a day, clicking the Like
button 2.7 billion times,
and playing "Words
with Friends" instead
of filing those TPS reports.
Yeah--
Get back to work.
Facebook is for connecting
with your friends,
letting people know
what you're up to,
and creeping on your pals,
like a creepin' creep-o.
Oh, and also using
Timeline to create
an image-ified alternate
digital version of yourself,
thus offloading the less
pleasant parts of tending
to your own memories.
Making memories used
to be really hard.
It involved pens and paper
and the Postal Service
and scrapbooks and buying film
and developing film and family
photo albums and
keeping all this stuff
somewhere in the house,
like in a trunk or the attic
or something.
It was just the worst.
And because these
things are physical,
on top of having to
put them somewhere,
you could only share them
with a limited number
of people at one time.
But even though it
makes it easier to do,
Facebook didn't invent
conspicuous consumption,
self-documentation, or the
act of sharing heinously
boring vacation albums.
Don Draper invented that.
It's called a carousel.
People have always loved
to advertise what they have,
where they've been,
and who they know,
because these things are a very,
very big part of our identity
construction.
The clothes we buy, the music
we listen to, the car we drive,
our hairdo, our beard
trimming regimen--
these objects and preferences
perform a signification.
A punk rocker advertises
his culture with a mohawk,
and a businessman with
a very expensive watch.
Or a fancy vacation,
which he'd probably
really like to remember.
And why would he like to
remember his 14-day sojourn
to Monte Carlo?
Philosopher John Locke's theory
of personal identity states
that it's because
we tend to construct
our idea of ourselves,
our own identity,
based upon what we
know and remember
of our past experiences.
Things which we can't
or don't remember,
then, are not part
of our identity.
But here's the thing.
Facebook does all of this
memory and identity construction
stuff, and it sort of does
it a whole lot better--
and to a degree of
dissemination that was
impossible before the internet.
It's tough to say,
and estimates vary,
depending upon who you ask,
but the average human brain
can hold somewhere between
1 and 10 terabytes of data.
Facebook does more than
that in photos every hour,
and it does it better.
Well, "better."
Actually, yeah, better.
No quote fingers better.
Just better.
I mean, our memories
are actually pretty bad.
Think about it.
If iPhoto had to stop
and be like, "Um, yeah,
uh, give me a second," every
time you asked for those photos
from the Grand Canyon, and
then gave you this blurry
mess where, like, some
of the colors are wrong,
and your friend Dave is there,
even though he was visiting
his mom in Cleveland that
week, you'd be pretty miffed.
Facebook is doing,
through your memories,
what Google did for
simple facts, lyrics
to songs, and the
casts of movies.
Which is cool, because
like Jeff Goldblum
and his closet of all the same
suits in "The Fly," you can use
those brain parts
for other stuff,
like "Adventure Time" quotes,
or ukulele songs, or both.
(SINGING) It's "Adventure Time."
Come on grab your friends--
But here's the other thing.
Timeline and photo
albums and friend groups
and all the other
memory-sorting goodies
give you so many
opportunities for broadcasting
and constructing yourself.
For instance, it's
thought that people
can maintain between 100 and
200 regular persistently social
relationships.
Now, this includes everyone
from your closest friends
to people you see
semi-regularly,
like maybe the friendly guy who
sells you a bagel every Tuesday
morning.
This number, called
Dunbar's number,
named after anthropologist
Robin Dunbar,
describes your brain's
cognitive friend limit.
Facebook's technological
friend limit
is 5,000, which is over 33
times the average Dunbar
number of 150.
So when you're uploading photos
or telling stories or putting
things on Timeline from
before Facebook even existed,
you're doing it for
yourself, but then
also for a group of people
potentially much larger
than the number you
could possibly know.
People look down on the photos
of children, status updates,
and this "story of your
life" business-- essentially
memory sharing-- as stuff
people don't care about,
or oversharing, or
sometimes even dishonesty.
But new ways of writing
and communication
are weird and scary,
and this one bridges
the particularly awkward gap
between the personal diary
and the public
performance of self.
Which makes it weirdly
both trivial and important.
Maybe not important to you,
but definitely to at least one
person, the person who
put it on Facebook,
hoping to advertise a
specific idea, opinion, event,
or who knows what else?
Or maybe, more significantly,
create a browsable digital self
that they can use to gain a
clearer understanding of where
they've been, and
therefore, who they are.
Poke!
What do you guys think?
Is Facebook useful as
a memory surrogate?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you need help
remembering to watch our videos,
you could always just subscribe.
Let me tell you about
comments about "Homestuck."
Let's see what you guys had to
say about last week's episode.
GrayderFox, you
were not kidding.
Rots28 says that he experiences
some effort justification
every time he watches a
film by Jean-Luc Godard,
which I respond, really?
I could watch
"Masculin Feminin,"
like, a million times.
But that probably makes
me a liberal arts unicorn.
DimensionStudios9007
wants to know
who my favorite
"Homestuck" character is.
It's Dave.
It was Rose.
Now it's Dave.
Kevansevans and vanny0jae
point out that "Homestuck"
could actually lose a fair
amount of its complication
if you have been following
it as it's been created,
not coming into it at the
end with 5,000-plus pages.
Which is true, but it also
has a lot of complicated time
business, complicated plot
business, tons of characters.
So parts of it are still
legitimately complicated.
tamral31 points out some
epically long fan fiction,
while dread max
points out "Inception"
as an example of
really complex cinema.
And this really causes
an interesting comparison
between pieces of media that
are needlessly complicated
and needfully complicated.
And I wonder which
of those two examples
falls into each of
those designations.
MrXarlable, I have a
response to your question,
just not right now.
So keep your eyes out.
AutismPersonified points out
that very complicated writing
can sometimes be trimmed
down to something friendlier,
and this reminds me what I
think is Jonathan Franzen's
first rule of
novel-writing, which is
the audience is not the enemy.
Franzen could maybe take a
little bit of his own medicine,
but it is still a
very valid point.
To bjwaters, I've given your
comment much consideration,
and to it I respond that that is
just, like, your opinion, man.
Ybarchov21, what did I say?
No spoilers.
God!
Bizgotye, who has
an awesome username,
makes a point about people
lording their accomplishment
of having read "Ulysses" over
other people, which I can say,
as a person who has done
it, that it happens,
and you shouldn't do it.
Well, thank you so much.
I mean, it's not--
it's not really us.
It's our awesome subscribers.
But thank you for
the compliment.
My name is Mike, by the way.
It's nice to meet
you, Julius Cesar.
[THEME MUSIC]
