Fake fun in the land of false friends

Living in Malta has always been claustrophobic, and now people are going out of their way to make matters worse for themselves with Facebook.

Facebook is for people who live miles apart from each other, perhaps even thousands of miles and in another country altogether, and for those who would otherwise rarely meet or keep in touch.

But many of the people of this little island have taken to it with passion and adapted its use to the same cultural purpose which has them sitting for hours on boats moored in the same bay and even tied to each other, parking their ‘summer homes’ in a tight jumble in overcrowded (and illegal) caravan sites, buying holiday homes overseas en masse in gated compounds so that there are other Maltese around when they go to Italy, and barbecuing their sausages squashed together on the same strip of beach.

Many Maltese appear to be using Facebook only to keep in touch with those people they see all the time and are in touch with anyway. A woman drops her children off at the school gates, waves a greeting to the other mothers there, then within an hour she’s back home and on Facebook, keeping in touch with the women to whom she has just said goodbye.

You look at some Facebook conversations – because you can, lots of them are public – and you begin to wonder whether some of these people have lost touch with reality.

The problem area appears to be with the pre-internet generation, those in their late 30s, 40s, 50s and even 60s, whose lives were shaped in a world devoid of internet and certainly of social networking sites and Facebook.

Young people – those who grew up with the internet – do not separate their life on the internet from their life outside it. It is one seamless whole, and because of this they are more cautious than their parents.

Their parents, on the other hand, have an internet life and a life outside the internet. They see the internet as the diametric opposite of what it is. They think of it as an enclosed and self-contained world and that what happens in their internet life has no bearing on their ‘real’ life.

This shapes their internet behaviour, which instead of being more restrained and careful ends up being more lax instead. The internet seems to work on the Maltese middle-aged like a liberating force which has them doing and saying things that they would not do and say ‘in public’. They seem not to understand that nothing could possibly be more public than the internet.

That 20-year-olds are more grown-up about Facebook than their parents would be amusing were it not so deeply tragic.

Conversations on Facebook take place on what is called a ‘wall’. Facebook could not have chosen a better name for it because exchanging views on that wall is far more public than putting them on a poster and pasting it up on the real thing made of stone in a busy street.

Walls are accessible to hundreds of one’s Facebook ‘friends’, and any one of those can take a screen shot of a conversation and keep it for when it might turn out to be useful, or email it on in turn to others.

Yet there are middle-aged men and women – but mostly, I must say, women – who bitch, gossip and banter on these very open walls as though there are only three or four of them sitting cosily at a restaurant table with nobody eavesdropping. Unbeknownst to them, their conversations about other people are copied on in their full glory, with the names and pictures of the participants and their bitchy remarks, to the very people they are bitching about.

Of course, some of the gossips might not care about this, but others would be mortified because they want to be able to meet the subjects of their tittle-tattle at parties and in the street and smile at them as though they are real friends rather than just Facebook ‘friends’.

But after they’ve been caught red-handed on Facebook, they can’t.

It is one thing having somebody come up to you and say: “Oh, you know what X said about you?” You can brush it off. You haven’t heard it yourself.

You can’t know for sure, so you give X the benefit of the doubt. But it’s quite another thing seeing, right there on somebody’s Facebook wall, X’s name and face and his or her nasty remark about you right beneath it. That’s what is known as incontrovertible proof, and the next time you run into X there won’t be many smiles.

This happens because the middle-aged think that Facebook is the equivalent of a cosy chat in a bar. You can say what you like and it stays right there between you. When confronted with the consequences of what can happen when you conduct on a Facebook ‘wall’ the sort of conversation you might have on a sofa, or when you post embarrassing photographs of yourself on your Facebook ‘album’, the people who do these things react with indignation and anger.

They don’t blame the consequences on their own silliness but on other people’s prying.

Nothing can be less private than Facebook, a lesson that is all too often learned the hard way. Also, few things can be more unnecessary than Facebook in a small and no-space-to-breathe society like Malta, where people Facebook their friends in the morning and see them at a party in the evening.

You would think that the enforced claustrophobia of being one of 450,000 people on two little rocks would drive people to seek more privacy and to get away from the constant pressures of over-familiarity. But it appears not, because with Facebook, the opposite is happening.

People are using it to invade their own privacy and that of others. You come home, slam the door in relief behind you after being accosted on all fronts by irritating people you have been forced into contact with since the age of five, switch on your computer, log onto Facebook, and there they are, accosting you yet again.

The most tragic kind of Maltese Facebook users are those who engage with the medium as a sort of Second Life. They have their real life and then they have the life they have created for themselves on Facebook. Their Facebook profile is a kind of alter ego who is forever having fun or, as the expression has it, who ‘has a life’.

Their Facebook pages bristle with photographs of them in various poses of great enjoyment. Women in their 40s rest their engineered breasts on the sills of swimming-pools. There are close-ups of ageing bikini-clad bottoms and even of what little girls call ‘front bottoms’.

There are women in their 50s drunk and eyes rolling after a rather too lengthy lunch. There are men in their 40s who are ‘interested in women’ and ‘looking for friendship’ who receive ‘Facebook kisses’ from women – names and faces displayed – who must be truly desperate.

One man in his 50s poses in tiger-trunks by a pool and receives Facebook ‘valentines’ from men as well as women, oblivious to how his office colleagues must be killing themselves with laughter at his expense. No, sir, you don’t look sexy. You look like a loser.

Minette Marrin, in The Sunday Times (London) two weeks ago, wrote: “The longing to have lots of Twitter followers and Facebook friends is something I cannot understand. Even without all those thousands of virtual chums, I often feel slightly oppressed by the large numbers of people whom, as a journalist, I have inevitably met through work and whose names and faces often fade into such soft focus that, all too embarrassingly, I don’t quite recognise them at this conference or that think-tank.”

Her article was called ‘Facebook, a competition for the most imaginary friends.’

Over-reliance on Facebook is, in the ultimate telling, for those who would like us to think that they have a life, but who are actually broadcasting their longing for love and attention to people who don’t care about them at all.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.