Sweet Dreams are Made of These: a Cursory Examination of the Uses and Abuses of America’s Favorite Social Network Part I

Since its infancy, humans have been using the Internet for what we do best; create communities and grow relationships. It began as a trickle with the UseNet newsgroups in the early 1980’s, and awkward email provider AOL continued it in the 90’s. Yahoo! And MSN made instant messenger popular, and then Friendster and MySpace made the first attempts to evolve social media into its full potential. None of them anticipated Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Originally available only to college students, Facebook graduated with the Millennial generation and followed them to work, rapidly subsuming the majority of demographics in North America and eventually drawing even grandma into its gaping maw. Now we have many networks to choose from, each addressing a slightly different social need. Linkedin is for professionals, Twitter is for celebrity hounds, and Instagram is for illiterates*. But Facebook, the social media geared for personal life, is king of them all. Social media has created new ways for people to interact, resulting in much confusion and testing our adaptability. Though human nature remains unchanged by the advent of Facebook and social media in general, our nature is prodded into new behavior by the exponentially larger audience we may engage with through these social networks than before. This post explores exactly what Facebook is, how it works, and some of the rules that have emerged regarding its use.

Because many social media accounts are linked to multifarious activities on the web, it is difficult to accurately determine how many active users any one brand has. However, it is a safe gamble to say that Facebook is perceived as the social network, beating out competitors such as Twitter and Google+ not by thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands, but by millions of users. This favored social network is used to maintain contact between people via Internet, with every variation such an open ended application implies. The social aspect of Facebook is easy to spot. Users are encouraged to fill out a profile citing where they live, work and general interests, and to make their page available to people they know in real life. The program helpfully asks “what’s on your mind?,” and if you respond your friends and acquaintances that you have added have instant access to your private musings so easily made public. Pictures may be uploaded and discussed, and various applications may be used to tweak the experience, typically by allowing friends to play games with one another. Furthermore, comments made on a status update or picture are visible not only to the original poster, but also to all of the original poster’s friends. The results are that on Facebook, all of the social circles that were once kept apart from one another may be merged in a spectacular Venn diagram of human interaction, allowing friends of the user to see a side of them that they have never seen, and possibly never wanted to see, before. This semi voluntary network is what separates software like Facebook from any other social medium. Where phone conversations are typically personal interactions between two parties, and emails require a user to individually list every recipient, Facebook is an inordinately easy method for firing information in a scattershot to all friends at once, provided they are also users. This ease has provided a somewhat socially acceptable means for communicating and displaying whatever takes the users’ fancy, from mundane complaints and favorite quotes, to news articles links supporting favored causes and “selfies,” or pictures taken of ones’ self with a camera phone in the mirror, with apparent bonus points if the lips are flattened to mimic the bill of a duck. 

In some cases relationships are formed and facilitated exclusively through the medium, but more often Facebook is used to supplement offline relationships. Facebook is particularly helpful in maintaining contact between individuals that are geographically separated to a degree where regular face to face interactions are not practical, such as an interstate or transnational relationship. However, when coupled with smartphones, Facebook enables individuals to interact with every one of their friends simultaneously, and from any location. Thus, users may live in constant community with every individual of personal consequence to date, from the old high school bestie now living in Toronto to the roommate who is currently using your soap.

Like any other social medium, Facebook has acquired its own set of rules for acceptable behavior. Individual communities will always have their idiosyncratic mannerisms, but on a broad scale Facebook users have established a set of general expectations for those that share the network. Though Facebook taboos are too numerous to discuss in detail here, a few of the most important ones will be highlighted. The first concerns who a user should invite into their network in the first place. Though some users have a tendency to “friend” even their most casual acquaintances, it is generally considered wise to accept only individuals that would be considered friends in real life. Thus, bosses and subordinates, distant relatives, and a fellow classmate you once had an interesting conversation with may not be the best candidates for a Facebook friend. The second important rule is selecting what to say on the network. Since many users have learned to socially interact on a far more limited scale than what Facebook offers, it is easy for them to forget that every other user in their network can see what they type. Conversation topics that are acceptable for some relationships could be too much information for others. Additionally, since Facebook takes place on the Internet, everything posted on it is essentially permanent. Words typed in anger, passion, foolishness or ignorance, can never be taken back or deleted. Thus, users are encouraged to be mindful of what they say on Facebook.  “Tagging” a friend in a photo or post that they may find embarrassing is equally taboo, as it indicates that the tagger is only concerned with their direct relationship to the tagee, without any regard for the tagee’s other relationships. This leads to the next Facebook rule; narcissism should be held in check. There is a small degree of selfishness that is expected; by posting a status update a user assumes that at least a few of their friends will care about what they are saying. However,  persistently bombarding friends with pictures of a pet or child, links and comments with a religious or political theme, a sickeningly public romance, or even simply making too many posts, monopolizes the conversation and implies that the user thinks his own life is more interesting and worthwhile than his friends. Finally, though Facebook was created to bring people together, it is possible to use it to isolate and persecute others. Negative comments can be made just as easily as positive ones, for example, and since the default setting is to send information to everybody, deliberately omitting individuals from seeing posts can be a subtle but powerful way to demean other users. These are just a few rules established on Facebook, but they are largely informal and are often discovered only after they have been violated.

This concludes part I

*Instagram is a very cool idea with some amazing artistic possibilities, but in practical application it falls short of its potential

You Don't Know Dick About Fairy Tales

Some of you may know that the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales are a little more, um, gruesome and terrifying than good ol’ Walt has led us to believe. I’m not talking about the paradoxically life affirming kind of terrifying that we get in those classic slasher films like, I dunno, Friday the 13^th or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (has a nicer ring to it than New Jersey Weedeater Manslaughter, but only if you’re not from New York). I’m talking about the ucky, existential terrifying that you get after you realize that the Middle Ages were packed so full of woman hate, they must have eaten it for breakfast. Like, you could stop at any Olde Taverne and get some dirt stew, a spoonful of plague and a heaping side of misogyny. There was so much it that it simply has to be ground up in your DNA and you will never get rid of it, no matter how much Virginia Woolf you read. I submit to you Sleeping Beauty as an example. It begins like you would expect, beautiful girl, witch not invited to the christening, spinning wheel blah blah blah, but when the handsome prince discovers her sleeping he doesn’t exactly stop at a kiss, and she doesn’t wake up. He just does his thing and goes on his merry, and she wakes up nine months later after she gives birth and her baby sucks out the splinter in her finger that made her fall asleep. The moral of the story? Lucky people are always lucky, even when they are asleep. 

What?!

Feminists get all upset at Disney because in their version, the princess isn’t empowered and she just kind of sits there waiting for the prince to rescue her. In Grimm’s she’s the exact opposite if empowered; they celebrate her abuse! “It’s a good thing that witch cursed you,” they say, “Otherwise the prince never would have given you a rape baby and then where would you be?!” Relatively speaking, Walt Disney is a veritable bastion of equality and progressive thinking.

So the old Grimm’s are terrible, but in this last semester I learned that modern interpretations of old folktales are somehow worse. Impossible, you say? Oh you poor, sad naïve soul, you underestimate the perversions of liberal academia. I submit Little Red Riding Hood for your, uh, well, “pleasure” isn’t the right word unless you have some pretty weird kinks, and “edification” doesn’t quite fit either. I guess “education” is going to have to work, and you can see what you are missing by not getting a liberal arts degree.

You know the story. Wearing her new cloak, Red skips off through the woods to see grandma and gets stopped by the Wolf, and he is erm, big, if you get my meaning. And bad, he’s also bad, and he chats with her a bit and learns where she’s going. He then takes a shortcut through the forest, eats grandma whole, then gets dressed up in her clothes because no one will ever know!  In the meantime, Red takes the long way and says hi to the woodsmen/man because foreshadowing! then arrives at grandma’s cottage. This is where the old versions take a turn for the slightly bizarre. Big Bad “Grandma” Wolf asks Red to take off her clothes and snuggle because “I’m so cold.” Right. Red complies, then starts the infamous “what big (insert body part here, if you get my meaning) you have” dialogue culminating with the “better to eat you with” line, and then the tale can vary. Sometimes a woodsman busts in just in time to save Red and cuts grandma out of the wolf’s belly. Sometimes there is no woodsman, and the wolf eats up Red if you get my meani­- oh screw it, it’s about penises ok? The whole thing, according to Professor P., is about sex, and anything that is vaguely shaft like or even roughly associated with masculinity is a phallic object. The woods are phallic, the wolf is phallic, the woodsmen are phallic, their axes are phallic, and if you think it ends there you are so pathetically wrong. The wolf’s ears, nose, tongue, tail, and especially teeth are all phallic too*. He’s just this big ol’ penis monster, and there’s nothing you can say to convince us otherwise. When you think about it, at all makes sense.

Ever wonder why the hood has to be new and red? Because it represents her first menses, that’s why. This girl is a woman now, and she is headed off to her sexually mature grandmother’s to get a Little Talk about how the birds and the bees ate the cabbage. The Wolf represents a sexual predator that wants to take Red’s innocence. By cutting ahead to grandmas and eating her up, he removes Red’s access to sexual knowledge so that he can easily take advantage of her. Asking Red to take off her clothes is not as symbolic as you think it is, he just wants to see her nekkid. Red complies, and then she starts making comments. Not the pertinent comments she should be making like, “You sure don’t look like grandma” or “Grandma, you sure are acting kind of pervy.” Instead she comments on the size of “grandma’s” ears, nose, teeth, tail, ey- wait, tail? Red notices that grandma has a tail and still doesn’t act like she knows what’s up. That’s because she kind of already knows what is going on and she secretly wants it. She’s kind of suspected what the wolf was after since he started hitting on her in the penis woods, and she could have notified the woodsmen that she met in the interim, but she’s sexually curious so she’s going along with it. When the Wolf discards his “disguise” that nobody was buying and makes his attempt to destroy Red’s innocence, she doesn’t save herself because, truth be told, she’s not all that interested in being saved

There you have it, with a great meta-twist I have stolen your innocence, and Little Red Riding Hood will never be the same.

*the Wolf’s eyes are not phallic, that’s too big a stretch even for English instructors. Instead, the Wolf uses his eyes to visually objectify and “devour” Red, much like the camera does to women in many Hollywood films, but that’s a lesson for another day