To friend, or not to friend.

In 1979, Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, a book which diagnosed contemporary American society and found it wanting: wanting attention, wanting to feel good about itself, wanting to remove obstacles from self-fulfillment. Morevoer, as an historian Lasch was quick to indict the prevailing obsession with the present, the obliteration from memory of the past, and the careless neglect for the future. Pathological narcissism had supplanted the individualistic and pioneering impulse in the American spirit, spawning a generation of "me"-ists afraid of commitment (to others and to society at large), yet seeking approval and affirmation for unworthy accomplishments.

So Lasch was a bit of a pessimist.

But I return to the Culture of Narcissim whenever I think about Facebook (or any other social media network), which has revolutionized the concepts of community and personal relationships at the cost, arguably, of "real" community and personal relationships.

Now, to play the devil's advocate:

Studies have shown, and laymen lament, that Facebook unwittingly encourages and enables our own narcissism. It thrives on it. We post pictures of ourselves, sometimes hundreds of them; record our banal activities, which increase exponentially thanks to hand-held computers, and wait for others to remark on our grafitti, while we remark on theirs. In some ways, Facebook has set up a mutual admiration society, in which members can legitimate each others' starkly boring lives, befriend (and unfriend) each other with impunity, or become voyeurs of one another's worlds. In the absence of work or more creative endeavors, we have virtual scrabble, Farmville, and Mafia Wars for our shared recreation. Our days pass on a perpetually refreshed screen of activity; but that screen is of a contant, relentless present. The archive of our textual activity is always gradually being purged.

Of course, the success of this jeremiad against Facebook depends on its simplification of the medium. Its benefits are not usually addressed (assuming there are some) because its pathologies are easier to discern. With respect to community, Facebook provides an alternative village, a democratic arena of sharing and playing, of general belonging without physical contact. Not only do we air the bric-a-brac of our lives but also important news stories, information about causes important to us, and appeals to support those causes. Some of the videos we share are quite funny and intelligent, like the ones produced by the Onion, and to an extent, like those by CampusHumor. I might even hail the imaginative merits of Facebook, particularly in the way of inspired status updates, those reflecting a tongue-in-cheek or madcap sense of humor, that we can't help but laugh at and participate in. In nothing else, the medium provides a wonderful opportunity to practice our irony.

But where does that leave non-virtual reality, the world of historical continuum, where Descartes reasoned out his existence, where people do, of necessity, meet? The land of sensual experience, where Johnson refuted Berkeley's solipsism by kicking a stone? The reality of war and poverty and disease and injustice? I think Lasch would say that Facebook inhibits us from really engaging with that world by marginalizing it. We don't generally post images of the brutality of life, though when we do, rarely, their serious effect is mitigated, then swept away, by the rush of unserious content. What does that say for our instinct to deal with the world? Have we been conditioned to shrink from it and find refuge in the general safety of social networking? Have we become too comfortable?