Fakebook (5 page)

“Great! See you then, 10:00 a.m.! Oh, one more thing,” Kadisha said. “We need you to record a tape of you at home. Be sure to use all those Limp Bizkit posters as a backdrop!”

Uh oh…those posters didn't exist. They were just images I'd grabbed off eBay and photoshopped in.

“Hey, I just remembered. I have an exam tomorrow. Can we do it Thursday instead?”

“No problem. See you then!”

The next day I skipped class and crisscrossed the state, going from Spencer Gifts to Spencer Gifts, until I had bought up every Limp Bizkit poster in New Jersey. All the while I had my Discman playing through the car's cassette deck, blasting a newly purchased
Chocolate
Starfish
at top volume as I repeatedly yelled, “I LOVE LIMP BIZKIT. FRED DURST IS THE GREATEST POET OF OUR TIME.”

I stayed up all night and crammed—making probably the world's first Limp Bizkit flash cards. I hopped on every message board and every fan page I could find. I read through hundreds of pages of horrendous grammar until I started to absorb the conversation, until I began to believe those opinions were mine. Until I believed in Limp Bizkit.

The email to MTV had started as a goof, just like my email to the Amish webmaster a couple years earlier. All of a sudden the goof became a challenge. And I almost made it happen. I got all the way to the final round of casting before I lost out to some dude with a very new-looking Fred Durst tattoo.

Now Fakebook was a challenge just like those, and I didn't want to come up short again. But it was different than the close call with MTV. It was much bigger, much more complex, and it had the potential to be…well, I wasn't exactly sure what yet. I just knew that I was on to something. Something that might have been right and might have been wrong, but no matter what, it wasn't something small.

To do this right, I needed to understand it. I had to dive in and understand what exactly it was that I'd stumbled into. I looked at my personal messages, finally ready to confront them.

Matt Campbell was a Facebook friend. In other words, he wasn't really a friend at all.

Sure, we were classmates once upon a time. But years later? He was just another piece of my news feed—part of that abstract mass of real-time minutiae.

Facebook friends didn't count. That's what I kept telling myself. The people I cared about, I kept in touch with, right? So those I didn't keep in touch with didn't really mean anything. Which meant it didn't matter what I pretended to do. To them I wasn't even real anymore; I was just a particular arrangement of pixels on a screen. It was all entertainment, and I was providing it.

At least that's what I'd assumed when I started this—and it was an assumption that gave me permission to do Fakebook with a clear conscience. But now I was ready to have that assumption challenged. I logged on to Facebook and read Matt's message to me.

He was taking this so seriously. He seemed almost startled by how important my page was to him. To him, my Facebook page wasn't a frivolous thing, but an inspiring and powerful experience that he felt like he was a part of.

He was wrong. Facebook was stupid.

I switched windows to Photoshop and looked at Party Ben Franklin. The photos were funny, and I wanted to make people laugh, dammit. The absurdity of all this was why I wanted to do Fakebook in the first place. That's what had captured our imagination at the Dublin House over Labor Day weekend.

Posting the Ben Franklin images would be taking a stand—staying true to my belief that Facebook was just a silly diversion, something that deserved to be seen for how superficial it really was. I wasn't going to be pressured by Christine's criticism or Matt Campbell's support.

I switched back to Facebook to upload the first picture.

But in that split second I inadvertently reread the line about “teasing Kelly in the seventh grade.”

I used to have a crush on Kelly, who used to live next door to Matt. I'd almost forgotten all about that.

I sat back in a room illuminated only by backlit words of support from someone I barely knew, but knew well enough to spark a fifteen-year-old memory that had all but faded away. He'd written a sentence that only had meaning between him and me.

It suddenly occurred to me that Facebook isn't just a website. It's an experience, and a deeply strange, deeply personal one. It involves almost everyone you know and everyone you once knew.

Updates posted by ex-girlfriends living on the other side of the world, your own mother commenting on photos of last night's debauchery, a real-time review of a McDonald's McGriddle from your tenth-grade lab partner—it's laughable on the surface. But it's also hard to ignore the feelings stirred by an ex-girlfriend's update, how much this new transparency has changed your relationship with Mom, how that review keeps an old friend from fading out of memory. The relationships may not have evolved in years, but with Facebook, they haven't disappeared either. It's the cold storage unit of friendships, keeping them on hold, just one compelling post away from revival.

I'd decided to fake my profile because I was looking at Facebook as a whole, but that was a mistake. Everything looks smooth from a distance. But I was tapping into something much less frivolous and much more personal than I'd thought. It was morally complex but also irresistibly compelling. I didn't know what I was on to, exactly…but I knew I was on to something.

Christine was right. Bar crawling with Ben Franklin was too much. It could destroy the project before I even had a chance to understand it. And I wasn't quite willing to have Fakebook fall apart over something this silly, at least not yet.

So instead, my Facebook profile had a pleasant, uneventful few days in Philadelphia, enjoying the virtual hospitality of a friend and keeping Fakebook in a holding pattern.