Face Time

To the extent there's a type of person most likely to be on Facebook, I'm probably not it. But I'm an alumni agent for one of my schools, and it seemed like a good way to keep in touch with former classmates and organize reunions that the school has every few years. In no way was I curious about former flings. So a couple of months ago I created a Facebook account.

School reunions are fun, but even in moderation -- every five years or so -- they can chip away at fond memories with middle-aged reality. Facebook is a perpetual school reunion. The golden girl at the beach you somehow convinced to sleep with you during the summer between high school and college? Well, she spent a lot of summers in the sun after that one, and twenty years later it shows -- every single time you log into Facebook. The slender, sensitive soccer team captain you dated and were going to live with on a farm in Vermont? He's in Larchmont, trades stocks or bonds or something -- were his head and face always that big? -- and has a "Palin/Beck in 2012" link on his homepage.

Some former classmates have never shown any interest in coming to a reunion. I've always written this off to things like apathy, unpleasant memories (adolescence isn't fun for everyone) or insecurity about middle-age waistlines. Maybe I've got it exactly backwards. Instead of being worried about how others will see them, could they be worried about how they'll see others? I've searched for some of them on Facebook. Maybe it makes perfect sense that they don't show up there either.

Wistful, reality-jolted reminiscence is a natural function of age, not social networking sites. What's new here is the effect this type of technology has on the past and our perception of it. Memories of the golden girl and soccer team captain can withstand the occasional school reunion or random meeting on the street. But the open-book, ever-increasing immediacy of Facebook and similar sites takes a subtle toll on frequent users. After the initial novelty of reconnecting with old friends, these sites debase and supplant memories and experiences and eventually rob people of them. If Facebook is a thief, Twitter is a raging kleptomaniac. Your hot prom date from 1983 updates you every few minutes about the long checkout line at the grocery store or how the dog just pooped on the rug again. After a few days of this, that magical first dance you've always remembered with a quiet smile seems a bit less magical. The cumulative effect is a sort of mass Danielle Chiesification of the past. We're all wearing that baggy white sweater, every day and all the time. If there was ever anything else -- beauty titles or just good times around a keg -- it's been buried in an avalanche of Facebook pages and tweets.

I wonder how this will affect kids as they get older. Until recently, people went from one distinct stage in life to the next, only occasionally revisiting previous stages via reunions and dusty photo albums and old yearbooks at moving time. Now everything is online and updated in real time. Will those who grow up with this technology eventually look back on life as a long continuous blur, and never know the sense of nostalgia that comes from seeing -- or not seeing -- someone after a few decades?

For thirty and forty-somethings, whose formative years were the comparatively prosperous 1980s and 1990s, the debasement of the past is compounded by the contrast between those times and today. The past is not only formative, it's stabilizing, an anchor. You're left with tea parties, two wars, and 10% unemployment. Maybe in twenty years some new technology will make these seem like the good old days.