Gaining face on Facebook

God help me, I'm on Facebook.

Sucked in by a friend at work, I'm now part of the online social networking scene. Which is funny, considering how little interest I've ever had in the offline social networking scene.

Chalk it up to karmic payback for my heretofore antisocial existence, but I spent my first three days on Facebook casting about for friends and being bitter that I couldn't find any. But then I found a couple more co-workers I like, then some people from my years in Vancouver, and a few degrees of separation later my friends list is coming along nicely.

The pressure to build a decent list of friends is almost as overwhelming as the pressure to make yourself seem cool. This is high school all over again, but with the added humiliation of realizing that at 36, I'm essentially hanging with kids who are still in high school for the first time.

But there are consolations. What interests me more than the solipsistic self-aggrandizement of padding my own profile page is randomly surfing the friends lists of people I don't know. Facebook lets people post messages, photos, interests and various favourite things. It's really nothing more than the inane bric-a-brac people used to plaster on their home pages in the early days of the Web; but when it's this easy to browse, it can be enthralling.

Do it for awhile and you start to get a sense of the vast world beyond your narrow geographic and socioeconomic confines. People you will never know, never even pass on the street, are living out entire lives. Working, going to school, dating and marrying, breaking up and "hooking up"—all with their little networks of other people you will never know. And they're all having shitloads of fun, if their profile photos are any indication.

But of course, those of us who are a little older than the main Facebook demo know there's more to us than who we know. Same goes for what we do and what we consume. For all its time-killing charms, Facebook is a book you can only judge by its cover because the rest is all blank pages.