Facebook is full of modern Dorian Grays - Sydney Morning Herald
Facebook is full of modern Dorian Grays
Alexandra Patrikios
September 21, 2011 - 6:38AM
Like the protagonist in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Facebook encourages the me, me, me. Photo: AFP
When I checked my Facebook yesterday for probably the 27th time that morning two things happened. On my newsfeed, there popped up a picture of a friend, supine on her pink bedspread, lips parted suggestively, suspended for the self-timer. On my sidebar, a chipper page suggestion, wondering if maybe I'd like to "like" a page devoted to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
An incisive intersection of ideas, don't you think?
Everybody knows someone who treats their Facebook profile like an endless photographic essay entitled, "All About Me". They post constantly about the minutiae of their most pressing philosophical binds, whether it's the hard-fought contest between a cheese toastie or baked beans for tea, or something considerably more consequential: to do spin class, or aerobics? That is the question.
Then there are those friends who change their profile picture everyday, without fail. Everyday they click through screens of thumbnail portraits, scrutinising the options like a magazine editor about to go to print, constantly searching for an appropriately flirty pout, a suitably coy smile.
It's like their profile is Dorian Gray a perfect, and perfectly Photoshopped image of youth, disguising all the insecurities stowed away in their internal attic.
For Facebook is ultimately a marketplace of vanity, where identity is reduced to a finite number of clicks.
Social media, as an inherently declarative communication form think status updates, quiz results, relationship statuses puts a premium on "personality", and while some say it facilitates conversation, it seems to me most people are just talking to themselves.
Constantly online and available, social media is constituted by endless statements. We're encouraged to repeatedly define ourselves through trivial, externalised means, as if the fundamental question, "Who am I?" can be solved with a two-minute pop culture quiz. Who am I? What kind of question is that? Check out my profile I totally did the Sex and the City quiz, I'm a Miranda.
It's a communication platform that prizes ceaseless connectivity with others, but by way of its emphasis on stating self-truths, cocoons us in a cycle of personalised media-monitoring; a kind of paradoxical isolation born of the constant need to reaffirm who you are to a host of invisible assessors.
As a generation we're told to "broadcast yourself", as if any snippet of self-discovery is only deemed worthwhile if it can be tagged, linked and uploaded. In the most formative period of our lives, the process of self-formation has become fodder for the public record.
Which is ironic, really. Social media is supposed to be about being able to connect with the world, or rather "your world". But by fashioning a viral hub of individualised information, we've all but lost the ability to really connect with the one person you'd hope would top the list of your 574 online "friends" ourselves.
That said, blaming Facebook for a social trend towards "me, me, me" syndrome is like blaming the mirror for narcissism.
In many ways, a society gets the technology it deserves, and since being (somewhat portentously) invented as an online forum to rate college girls' attractiveness, Facebook has simply reflected a culture of shallow individualism and fetishistic introspection.
Of course, I could be overreacting. All these self-absorbed posts could be mere youthful vanity, a natural byproduct of sexual maturation and the arrival of one's physical peak. But on the other hand, it could be something more sinister a particularly fervent form of self-obsession fuelled by a readily accessible means of creating your own personal brand of online celebrity.
In his famous cautionary tale, Oscar Wilde paints a portrait of a beautiful, young man who is seduced by, and in turn seduces, the glittering world of high society.
Populated by vacuous toffs, easily won by high cheekbones and a milky complexion, Wilde's superficial society runs on glib chit-chat and self-concern.
When he is eventually discovered dead, the hitherto ageless Dorian's internal decay is finally laid bare for all to see. "When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty."
I may not have a supernatural self-portrait stowed away in my attic, but I do have an iPhone an iPhone with a Facebook app equipped with its own sort of "wall" on which I can hang a strategically "splendid" portrait of "exquisite youth and beauty".
Which makes me wonder have I become the painting?
Alexandra Patrikios is an journalism student at RMIT.
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