Does Facebook divide people as much as it connects them?

Yes and no. There are, obviously, many positive aspects to Facebook. You can find people with the same interests as you, join groups, and find new friends, find events in your neighborhood, and you can keep in contact with friends and family far away. Personally, as someone who lives across the Atlantic from her family, the Facebook messenger app and WhatsApp have helped me keep my family up to speed with my life even though I only see them a couple of times a year. 

Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish that Facebook is not only this new way of communication and community, but it has also morphed into a much larger organism beyond our wildest control. In the book Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino analyzes the internet and our relationship to our virtual world. She reflects on how our naive view of the internet in the 80s and 90s has shaped our present relationship to social media. Even though all signs and research point to the destructiveness of it all we ignore it. 

Picture credit: Porter House Review

The increased stress levels, increased mental health issues, decrease sexual activity among Millenials, and several studies show that the modern person feels lonelier than ever before. Tolentino also examines how our online personas have heightened the importance of performance and those who are most successful at performing are rewarded for it. Our sense of identity is extended to the internet, but our online persona needs to be appropriate to all parts of our life. What we post online will stay there forever, so the creation of the online persona “is a self that can be viewed simultaneously by mom, future bosses, your eleven-year-old nephew” et cetera (Tolentino, 15). 

This delusion of our importance creates an illusion of a life that ultimately is harmful when we spend hours upon hours in a day online. Who are we and what are we? Which one of your friends do you post pictures of? What events are you invited to? And if you go do you actually have fun or is it simply for the online persona? Where do you catch the bus in the morning? What coffee shop do you go to? 

We have encapsulated into our own personal panopticon and there is no way out.