Essay: Facing My Facebook

By: Jennifer Fiorile

This interface is terrible, I think as I attempt to scroll down the page, waiting for it to load each time. Or maybe it’s my computer.

I'm looking for anything that might get me cancelled on the off chance that I become famous one day. In any case, I’m only in 2010 and I’ve got five more years to scroll through, but boy oh boy, those are some eventful years. It wasn’t until this moment that I ever considered that my Facebook page would encapsulate such a specific time in my life, though in writing it now it seems obvious. I promise you that at the time, we had no idea what kind of havoc this new arena of socializing would wreak on our collective and personal lives.

Back then, it seemed like a combination of MySpace and instant messaging. It was more mature, particularly because in 2005, when I set up my Facebook page, the site was only open to college students. The same college students who’d spent their teen years IMing and learning basic HTML for their MySpace pages, which were starting to collect digital dust. Prior to that, we were the ten-year-olds who had giant beige box computers at home and in computer labs at school. 

Initially, these were only for playing games on floppy disks—and, later, CD-ROM—and writing documents. A word processor with extra bells and whistles. At some point not long after, the internet came into play: email, chat rooms, browsing the AOL homepage. These gave way to downloading music illegally and burning CDs.

It all had an impact within the physical realm. When I played Oregon Trail with my friends, we would collect all the things we’d need—blankets, snacks, a Bible, my dog—and then gather around the computer to partially act out what happened to the characters in-game. I still remember the weird, mechanical smell of the computer lab. Computers had a smell.

They offered a more advanced way of doing already-familiar things. Making mixtapes by recording songs off the radio, writing letters, window-shopping. Those were experiences that translated logically into this new digital frontier. So, we, the children who were born into an analog world, were led down the primrose path, or rather the digital superhighway, a faster way of doing and learning.

In 1999, David Bowie gave a now-chilling interview about the internet: the interviewer says, “It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?” and Bowie replies, “No, it’s not, no. No, it’s an alien life form.” 

And speaking of aliens, Mark Zuckerberg was tinkering with a new website in 2003. Within two years the site opened up, first to Ivy League schools, then other US colleges, then international universities. For most of my life, I was pretty staunchly resistant to technological advances. I only joined AIM (an American instant-messaging service like MSN or ICQ) after a lot of cajoling from my sister. I didn't join MySpace until after I had Facebook. I didn't get a smartphone until six years ago. Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why I so readily joined Facebook; it seems like just the thing I would have been against. Maybe it was pure curiosity. I can't decipher my motives from memory.

The image of myself that I get as I look at pictures, comments, and posts from myself and friends in the first decade of the 2000s is different from how I imagine someone of a previous generation reading old journals and looking at photos. The inherent nature of social media is to perform your life for people you know and—more importantly—people you don’t. A journal doesn’t have a performative nature woven into its cloth. In previous generations, you could safely assume that most personally owned photos of you would be seen only by the people you generally chose to show them to. The nature of being photographed changed with Facebook: you knew that photos of you would almost certainly make it onto someone’s page, so the instinct was to perform your happiness, or any other quality that you’d want to communicate, for the camera.

As I approach 2008, I’m scrolling through my six months post-graduation in Bristol, England. I lived in a hostel and worked at a UK chain bar/restaurant. I feel a kind of pit in my stomach and try to move through it quickly, pausing only to look at comments from people I used to call friends saying they missed me. I started looking through my page to delete old, embarrassing comments and photos that I might regret now. Part of me feels like I could delete everything there and be better for it, though there’s nothing grossly offensive through the lens of 2022. 

It’s all just a version of me that, quite frankly, feels foreign—someone I understand mostly through memory, and memory is extremely one-sided. As I near the end of my college years, the girl in the pictures looks happy and included in a group of friends. Its different from how I felt at the time. I see myself smiling with people who I know full well did not elicit a feeling of happiness in me. Sometimes I'm smiling so widely, so eager to act comfortable with this group, that I cringe and think about deleting it. They're fully untrue images. Fifteen years on, I have the weird experience of looking at myself through the eyes of a stranger. But I also know the reality of that time so intimately. The image offers another perspective in my understanding of myself then, but in the end it only clarifies what I already knew.

The best comments are usually from my sister. One about us walking sixty blocks through New York City when she lived there. I remember that Sunday: sunny, early springtime, and we felt like walking after brunch at Pastis. Her inside jokes about our trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, to visit her then-boyfriend and his family. Or comments from people who are still in my life, including college friends. These feel like a note passed in class that I can uncrinkle and flatten out.

There are pictures from my two trips to Italy in college, my first trips abroad. That country opened my eyes to the beauty of the world in a whole new way. It taught me how much I love learning languages, and connected me to part of my heritage—my first trip involved visiting family along the western coast. Those pictures fill me with longing for an experience. All those things changed my life for the better. It’s like pulling out a shoebox of letters and photos from under the bed and having a good cry because you know now how meaningful those people and places would become. There’s a sadness, too, in knowing you can never revisit that moment. You can only look back on a version of it.

I’m not really sure what I think of the girl in these photos, but I know she meant well. It's common knowledge now that people perform a version of themselves on social media. But back then, it was all so new that people truly didn't know that. I didn't understand that I was acting. 

At least I had the opportunity and privilege to know I didn’t feel good and to make choices, like therapy, that led me to feel better and live better. I wanted to belong and to feel understood by the people closest to me. I understand now that achieving those goals starts with yourself and ends with finding it in other people.

My page stops loading in July of 2007. I’m disappointed. I’d wanted to see what my first post was, or maybe a clue as to why I'd joined the site in the first place.

One of the last comments is my sister‘s, from that same summer when she was in Vienna. I missed her terribly. She wrote, “Gute Farht! I have no idea what that means…Don't fart? who knows…the sign is everywhere. Auf Weidersehen!” After nine years living in Germany, I understand what Gute Fahrt means: have a good ride. She misspelled it, as well as Auf Wiedersehen. I’m so immune to it that the word Fahrt doesn’t even elicit a chuckle anymore. It’s funny what we can get used to over time. She didn't even know she was wishing something for me that I needed to hear.

I guess those first two years on Facebook are lost to time, or a weak internet connection. Maybe the page is protecting me from them. A kind of warning à la Dante: Turn back, any who cherish their image of themselves from the end of their teens…you may find things you never wanted to.

I believe the last years of my teens, when I started college in 2004, were happier than my early twenties when I finished. I don't blame Facebook entirely for that. I remember feeling energized by the possibilities of the world and learning more about other people’s lives. I remember feeling enriched by my own love of life. I think I want to keep my memory of that period this way. The ride hasn’t always been smooth, but the journey has taught me invaluable things, as all journeys do.

I barely touch my Facebook page these days and haven't posted anything personal in a few years. There’s no reason for me to keep it around, really. I could save the photos and special comments in a personal document. I can message people on different platforms, despite the fact that Facebook’s new home, Meta, also owns WhatsApp. Today’s teenagers don’t use Facebook. Good for them. Twenty-five-odd years into the digital revolution, there are more effective ways to share thoughts with the world, or at least with your friends, ways in which you can still maintain some level (or illusion) of privacy.

I’ll keep my page up for posterity, like an old cross-stitch found in the attic of a nineteenth-century home; like pottery, once used for normal, everyday purposes, that becomes a glimpse into the lives of ancestors. How bittersweet to know it was once cared for and is now obsolete. My Facebook page is an historical artifact from the turn of the millennium. Who am I to remove my contribution to it? I may not fully understand all the choices I've made, but I can say that I know who I am better than Facebook ever could.

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An audio version of this essay is available on Jennifer’s podcast, Talking in Bed.