Thefacebook re-unites friends, aids in social connectivity

Increasingly, my only tie to my distant life as a UT student has become the incredulous, unwieldy face book (http://tennessee.thefacebook.com). Those uninitiated, who probably have active social lives, play intramural sports or aren't stranded in a foreign country where men and women both carry Prada purses and speak a strange language, may ask, What is Thefacebook? Its FAQ claims that Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges and universities. More concretely, Thefacebook is a catalog of student profiles, where people list their interests and relationship availability and post a head shot. Which is to say that, like most other aggregates of 20-somethings (service fraternities, pre-professional societies, the production department of The Daily Beacon) Thefacebook is an excuse to find a date. Lest Thefacebook veil itself with any undue subtlety, users can customize their profiles to display exactly what their, ahem, objectives are friendship, dating, random play or whatever I can get. My friend, a fellow exchange student, is dating a young Korean man who developed the bad habit of saying play, whenever he means hang out. I wonder what sort of dates he'd get if he used Thefacebook. Here, perhaps, I should fake some indignation about such undisguised animalistic urges. But Ze Frank, on his humor site http://www.zefrank.com, reveals the real, time-consuming, soul-devouring element of social software like Thefacebook. It's like the L.A. of online communities, he says. It's like the requirements for friendship have been stripped to the very very bare minimums. Why exactly is it that through Thefacebook I've re-united with long-lost friends like the girl whom I inducted into French Honor Society during my senior year as part of my glorious, year-long reign as president (it's not quite true that our organization was termed the Sixth Republic)? Or the kid who sat next to me on the bus during my three college-application-padding years as a long-distance runner? They've been driven to establish contact because, with the click of a few buttons, I can become territory, like oil-bearing countries in the Middle East something for alpha males to battle over. At long last, we've quantified popularity, and it's the sum of the friends, acquaintances and outright strangers you can string together from the titanic mass of your 21-year-old life. Did you wipe my nose in third grade? Add me to your friends list! Did you check out a book from the library in which I wrote marginalia? Add me to your friends list! Do you share my interest in the religious architecture of the Sumerians? Add me to your friends list. PLEASE! Like checking your friends' away messages or reading their livejournals (Xangas if they're from the Pacific Rim), Thefacebook delivers another way to commodify and package our basic human need to socialize. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm tired of talking to people who sit next to me in class. It's so tiresome the opening parlays about the weather or Ukrainian civil discord or anti-ballistic missile systems, the constant need to stare into strangers' startling, expanding and contracting pupils, the way most people can't stop biting their nails or playing with their hair. Why put up with tics and pregnant silences when I can simply read their interests online and discover that their obsession with Beanie Babies, anime or political conservatism will ultimately render them inadequate as soul mates? It's true; I clearly hate inefficiency. That partly explains why I've already invented some new uses for Thefacebook. Come spring, I'd like to see SGA parties using Thefacebook to ensure loyalty. Party whips will spend days sifting through Thefacebook ensuring that none of their members are too cozy with the enemy. Or The Beacon could do an exposˇ revealing the usual, uncanny intimacy between graduating seniors and the people to whom they leave their cushy, Andy Holt Tower part-time jobs. We could invent drinking games connected to on-campus celebrities, like Six Degrees from Scott Thurman (which, right now, you people are doing an abysmal job at). This is of course only the beginning. Maybe I should add drinking games to my interests? That, indeed, is for me the greatest joy of Thefacebook transforming myself into a series of lists. It's the kind of thing I have a penchant for making into a production, like creating a mixed tape or finding shoes to match my belts. I spend hours walking the labyrinthine streets of Seoul muttering to myself, Is listing cheese as an interest too clichˇ-nerdy? Would saying I like to climb trees be precocious? I think it's a writerly instinct, or at least that's my excuse. I'm sure some brilliant MFA student, drunk on Kevin Smith, will spin some story told entirely through Friendster/facebook lists and publish it at McSweeny's. It might be as fascinating as a good rˇsumˇ. But I hope not to read it. Scott Patrick Thurman, a sadly unpopular junior studying English literature, can be contacted at sthurman@utk.edu and promises to write about Korea again next time.