OK, be honest... Have you ever scavenged through your Facebook friend's profiles looking for new Facebook friends for yourself?
I'm guilty. Consider David Interimone, (who hasn't yet responded to my friend request of an hour ago). I last saw him somewhere between 2 and 5 years ago at a random gas station in San Francisco near Geary and 19th where he actually recognized me from 15 or more years earlier. No wonder that on Facebook he has gathered 1289 friends. Yet his friends listing wasn't any help for me to find anyone to add to my profile...... I went through everyone else I could find and went through their all their friends too, trying to jog my memory.
I am facing the possibility that I've run out of people to friend. An existential limit to my friending.... It has been days since I had a direct search for anyone that turned up someone I was confident I knew among all the homonymous people sharing their name. And I realize my mind is not that great at remembering names....
Charles Baxter, the author of The Business of Memory summed up my concern:
- “In an information age, forgetfulness is a sign of disability and incompetence.” Not only that, but it’s extremely annoying.
I feel like Hal as his memory chips as Dave is pulling his memory chips....
- HAL plaintively pleads for him to stop: ‘Dave, my mind is going… I can feel it... I can feel it’ then begins to sing ‘Daisy’ in a ‘machine voice’; a little program that was installed on many computers of the day. It is just a computer again, its intelligence has gone.
 | "2001: A Space Odyssey." The best film death scene in this movie is of the HAL9000 computer. But its no less powerful than a human death. HAL has been malfunctioning and endangering the ship's crew so they have to shut him down. It's a long process and HAL loses his memory and functioning in degrees. This scene really shows that HAL is sentient with the emotional depth of a child. He is afraid to die and sings a song about daisies. |
Who is pulling my memory chips?
A mental block maybe? Forgetting names, Schacter (2001), chairman of the department of psychology at Harvard, labels it blocking, failure to retrieve names, rather than failure to store them.
- “Theoretically, remembering a name of anything requires sequential access to three kinds of knowledge: a visual representation; a conceptual representation of what the thing does; and a phonological representation of the sounds. Language processing models add a level, which Dr. Schacter calls the lexical level: how the word fits into a sentence. ”
afriendsia? Kind of like aphasia, but specifically targetted at inability to remember names of friends you are sure you know?
- "ANOMIA is closer to what you are looking for. With ANOMIA, the subject has difficulty remembering or recognizing names, which the subject should know well. "
- Wikipedia writes "Anomia is caused by damage to various parts of the parietal lobe or the temporal lobe of the brain. These damages can be brain trauma, such as an accident, stroke, or tumor. This type of phenomenon can be quite complex, and usually involves a breakdown in one or more pathways between various regions in the brain."
Oh great, the information mini-highway in my brain is developing potholes.
- "One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die." - Evelyn Waugh
So perhaps the whole Facebook exercise is a modern fertility rite.
And I think from looking at the friends of so many others, I am starting to have phantom "I know that person" when I don't.... It is bad enough when in real life I see someone who looks familiar, and I have to stop and figure out which continent do I think I know them from... Do I really know all the people I friended, or am I really just a fan of them? For example, Jeff Duntemann the author I just friend requested. Probably I've spent more time reading his books than directly talking with him. But I'm pretty sure he was a TASM beta tester and I talked with him then when he was authoring one of his early books. Didn't I? (I originally wrote Duncan, eventhough I just friended Jeff 5 minutes ago after finding him on someone else's profile. I am anxiously waiting on his response. See what I mean?)
Does my sending friend requests to people that I don't know endanger the entity known as Facebook? Will it someday decide to defend itself? Perhaps it already is. It keeps refusing my request to friend Phillipe Kahn, a public personality and the founder of Borland with probably hundreds or thousands of friends. Eventhough I have 5 mutual friends with him. And I spent 5 years of my life working for him. I tried searching for him three times, didn't find him. It was much easier to scavenge his link from one of my 5 friends.
But Facebook also decided to reject my attempt to friend John Miller from church. He is someone I regularly visit, I went to his most recent birthday party, and sometimes I drop by his house and we chat for hours. But Facebook wont allow the connection. Has it decided he is not important enough to have a 64th friend? Or is Facebook trying to tug on my memory chips.
Existentialism, "a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world"... Or at least a meaningless internet website. Maybe I should retreat to the safety of my wikis with their legions of anonymous visitors, and occasional anonymous comments. Where I'm not tempted to try to find a lot of meanings about anything other than how well do the intelligences known as search engines like my writing.
I wonder what percentage of the friend requests I sent out that actually looked at my request and didn't think i was cool enough to add to their profiles....
And why would people from high school a billion years ago, who I haven't spoken with since then, be so willing to add me to their profiles..... Or people adding each other from the past without any kind of "Hey, how are you, whats been happening for you?" comment back and forth....
Vanity... All is vanity.... Will I be able to break 100 friends by year end.....
Maybe I should go to china town in KL and get a Facebook specific card printed and then spend a few days in KL striking up conversations with strangers to create instant intimacy just to see if they will friend me.
Should I do that exercise on an entirely new Facebook account, so that I can track the results of it? Do I want to pollute my real account of people I barely knew decades ago with recent friends I even more barely know from last week? Existentialbook.com ?
"One who experiences existential angst comes face to face with the existential limits of their existence. For example, through the experience of eg. uncertainty, meaninglessness or endings or death, the resultant anxiety reflects their aloneness in making sense of their existence. As each of us proceed through our lives, we are bombarded with challenges to the fixed ways in which we define ourselves and our worlds. The unpredictable nature of others’ behaviour or our own challenges us to embrace the co-constructed nature of our phenomenal selves."
I need to find some university that will give me a PhD for writing a dissertation about this once I figure out something vaguely revelatory to say about this experience....
In case you think you know me, my facebook profile is at http://www.facebook.com/garnetchaney Go ahead and friend me.
Just don't be offended if I scavenge through your friends looking for someone I really know.
Links:
- http://www.screenjunkies.com/movies/genres-movies/drama/10-best-film-deaths/
- http://lifemyths.com/existential-angst/505/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
- http://reyadel.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/forgetting-names/
- Schacter, Daniel L. (2001). The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001 - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618219196