How many of your hundreds of Facebook friends do you actually know? Maine-based landscape photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander has 600 friends and is determined to meet them all. For an upcoming exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, “Are You Really My Friend? The Social Media Portrait Project,” Jan. 4-June 17, 2012, Hollander has set out on a global mission to visit, in person, all of her Facebook friends and take their photographs.
Since January of this year, she has been stopping by each of her “friends’” houses to take portraits that are unmediated by computer screens and the filters of self-presentation. According to Hollander, “Though we are in the initial stages of understanding the affects of social networking on American culture and photography, there is a pervasive feeling that it is changing our interactions with each other and building a false sense of community.”
Aside from the exhibition of portraits, Hollander says the project involves lots of audience participation and feedback, naturally. Not all of the photos will be displayed at once, for instance, and observers are invited to help select images and comment on their quality. Perplexingly, they are also welcome, she notes, to “critique the management of her Facebook page.”
I met Michael when I photographed Jon & Jones. He stopped over while I was there to return a bowl or pick up a bowl or something. Anyway, he told me he was done with FB and was going to write about it. About a week a go, he sent me an email to this piece he wrote. It's fascinating. What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook
The first thing I didn’t write about quitting Facebook was a status update to my friends saying, I’m quitting Facebook.
I also did not write a proposal for the nonfiction book I imagined,
which was about quitting Facebook. In the book, I would indulge the
conceit that my Facebook friends are, actually, my good friends, and
that the social network comprises a sort of community when taken as a
whole. Then, as one does with one’s friends, I would call each person up
or visit them and tell them I was leaving Facebook, which would create
an opportunity to talk about Facebook and this whole social media thing,
but mainly it would be to get to know something about who they actually
were and why we were linked in the first place and what it all might
have meant.
Eighteen weeks of five interviews a day would get me through my friend
list, I calculated. Friends from high school and college and grad
school. Friends of friends. Editors. Siblings and a couple of cousins,
my in-laws. Random admirers and hangers-on. The resulting book would
reflect our conversations about how much Facebook had enhanced our
friendships and our lives in general, or maybe it hadn’t, and we’d talk
about that, too. And we’d exchange info, and say goodbye, and then
linger, and wave, and wave, until we couldn’t see each other any
more—one of those departures where you look away out of exhaustion with
the moment, then when you look up find they’ve gone, vanished, as if
they hadn’t been there at all.
At the end of the book, I would actually unplug from Facebook, and I
would write about that, too, and the heartwarming account of the ties
that bind us would inspire you to hold your Facebook friends close, so
close, because the time we pass in this mortal coil is so fleeting; we
are truly encountering only the passing of the person, not the person in
themselves.
But I didn’t write this, nor did I write a status update about leaving.
When I quit, there were no goodbyes. No interviews. Just, I’m outta
here.
Another thing I did not write about quitting Facebook was that one of
the great social pleasures in my life has been to leave gatherings or
parties unannounced. You know, when the party is socked in solid from
the front door to the kitchen, and the conversation is drying up like
old squeezed limes, it’s easiest to keep heading out the back. How cool
the night. How open and unquestioning the darkness. “French leave,” we
English speakers say. (“English leave,” the French say.) Often I went to
parties to be able to vanish from them. But the disappearing act rarely
happens any more; I could never get away with it. Such pleasures one
has to give up because they’re so unsuited to middle-aged life. You get
trained, after a while, to going to every person in the room. Hey, great
to see you again. See you later. Send me a note about that thing. Yes,
let’s do that. Goodbye, bye. The book idea was, in a way, testing out
the durability of that social grace. But I didn’t write about either
topic.
I did, however, start an essay that could have been about why I quit
Facebook, except that I got distracted by the emergence of a genre you
could call the Social Media Exile essay, and I wondered whether I could
meet the conventions of that genre if I ever tried to write about why I
quit Facebook, though the truth is, I didn’t really want to write
another version of the Social Media Exile Essay, dramatizing the initial
promise of this or that social media or network, the enthusiastic glow
of online togetherness, then the disillusionment, the final straw, the
wistful looking back. I did write that it seems like so many people have
had their crack at “The Day I Quit Blogging” or “Why I Tweet No More,”
which aren’t real essay titles but could have been, also like “How
Google Broke My Heart” or “Farewell MySpace” or “Je Ne Regrette Rien, Friendster.” So this essay never got written.
I was also writing emails to former Facebook friends who had noticed
that I was gone from their friend list and who were taking my
disappearance personally, all because of what I hadn’t written about
quitting Facebook—which I didn’t start writing, because I had to placate
my friends. Really, it wasn’t because of you, it was because of the
whole enterprise, I wrote, which had begun to throw salt on my
misanthropy. I went no farther than that—I feared offending them if I
wrote about how difficult it became to have peaceable face-to-face
relationships with people who projected unlikeability online.
I did tweet the observation that Facebook isn’t going to pay you a
pension or 401k for all the time you spent there, and quite a lot of
people liked this. So that was one veiled thing I wrote about why I quit
Facebook.
I didn’t write about the shock of finding out that the two dear sons of
one of my Facebook “friends” had been tragically killed in an auto
accident, not recently but two years ago. Somehow I had missed this
fact, until an anniversary post by one of the grieving parents—the
status update elliptical, scourged by grief—pointed me toward the
incident. I do not know what I would have done or written if I had known
before. I did not write anything to them now because I felt so ashamed
of my ignorance amidst a wealth of things to click on and know about. A
wealth of things that may not matter so much. It’s always been a world
in which you can lose your children or your parents in an instant, but
somehow I have made it this far without knowing that in my gut.
Instead of writing about any of this, once I was not on Facebook
anymore, I found myself sending emails with some witty insights or
photos of my baby, but it just wasn’t the same; a request for housing
help for a friend via email got no responses. However, I was now talking
a lot about quitting Facebook, and this for a time became the most
interesting thing about me. Fueled by how interesting I now was, I wrote
a draft of an essay about writing about why I quit Facebook, which was
clever but did not contain any of the things I have already said I
didn’t write about. Plus, as the editor pointed out, I didn’t actually
explain why I had quit. I hadn’t written about feeling like Facebook was
a job. Like I was running on a digital hamster wheel. But a wheel that
someone else has rigged up. And a wheel that’s actually a turbine that’s
generating electricity for somebody else. That’s how I felt, which is
what I should have written.
I thought about how I didn’t want to write about why I quit, only about
how great it feels to be free, because how often do you get to leave a
job? Something along the lines of, you stand up at your desk, you un-pin
the photo of your dog or loved one from the cubicle wall, and you walk
right out the door, don’t take the elevator because it’s slower than the
stairs, and you bid the thrumming hive adios. Leaving Facebook felt
like that. The sun singing on your face like springtime. The birds all
whistling your theme song.
In the standard Social Media Exile essay, one doesn’t mention or
announce when one returns to blogging or Twitter. For each platform or
network one leaves, there’s another one to return to. Sometimes they’re
the same. So I’m going to close this piece by breaking that convention
and mentioning how easy it turns out to be to reactivate Facebook. When
you sign back in, all your stuff is there, as if you’d never left. It’s
like coming back to your country after a month in a foreign land, and it
makes one feel that the whole reason for leaving is to make the place
seem strange again. Being away from Facebook was certainly that. But I
had to come back. That’s where all the people are. I’ve got a book
coming out, and I need to let my friends know. Anyway, you know where to
find me and what to talk about when you do. I’ll have some cookies
baked.
You guys. There’s this photographer, Tanja Hollander, who is working on a project that is awesome. Trust me.
An article on Etsy’s blog explains it really well: “[Hollander has] taken camera in hand and is visiting each of her 626 Facebook friends, removing ‘virtual’ from their relationships and creating a portrait to document the moment.” The project is called “Are You Really My Friend? The Facebook Portrait Project.”
Hollander has her own blog where she posts the pictures, with vital stats like names, relationship and how long they’ve known each other. (Scroll through the first couple of posts to get to the pics and stats.) The portraits are fascinating in their honesty and intimacy. She captures her “friends” in their homes, looking like they normally would. This isn’t some fancy schmancy dolled up project. It’s real.
I have been wondering lately about how people define their online relationships. In a past post I explored the concept of IRL in present connotation. Before that, I grew tired of my collection of false online friendships and deleted Facebook.
I began to consider: how do these people fit into my definition of
“friend”? What do I want out of an online, or offline, community?
Today, I read a very interesting article: Are You Really My Friend?
about Tanja Hollander, a photographer who has set out on a mission to
meet and photograph every one of her 626 Facebook friends (ex-boyfriends
included) — I assume she will not be adding additional friendships
during the time period it takes to complete the project. The surprising
part, only two people have turned her down for privacy reasons.
Her challenge in this experiment is working with a patchwork of
varying degrees of friendship across the Facebook platform: friends,
acquaintances, business colleagues, family. It becomes something of an
introspective process.
Mary Bok with Surely and Honey the dogs, Camden, Maine. (taken by Tanja Hollander)
like many people i have mixed feelings about facebook. i was never a
great enthusiast but i have my account like everyone else and i admit to
enjoy strolling through peoples lifes like a voyeur and drop my "likes"
every now and then. and i also like to see what my distant friends are
doing and believe i'm closer to them with comments and likes. at the
beggining i was a "purist" - no, i will never accept anyone who is not my true friend!
i soon ate my words when work colleagues and old highschool friends i
didn't even remember the existence started asking to "become a friend". i
quickly forgot my purist principles and now have 420 friends (too many?
too few?) and often ask what is the sense of this community?
