Brave New World?

You know what I love? Yearbooks. A total stranger could hand me their high school yearbook on the subway, and I'd pore over it for hours. The yearbooks of people I actually know? Total fascination. I can get lost in them, immersed, cross-checking people for clubs and sports teams, younger siblings, on and on. As a child and a teenager, I used to lie on the couch in our den and read my parents', cover to cover, not so much imagining them as teenagers but imagining the whole world, wondering who was friends with who, why the class president had been elected, if the lead in the junior class performance of South Pacific was really any good or did she get the part because she was pretty--as she was also the homecoming queen. Seriously, I could do--did do--this for hours. Sometimes I can get into the wedding announcements in the New York Times like this--do the groom's parents, a plumber and a nurse, feel annoyed by their son's marriage to the flighty daughter of a hedge fund manager and a volunteer at the Met?--but not as much as yearbooks, which are not the beginning of novels, like the wedding announcements, but short stories--a slice of people's lives.

Facebook is my new yearbook. I don't actually spend that much time surfing Facebook, largely because I just don't have that much time. But when I do, an hour or so a week, spread out, I can get lost in an individual's "slice"--the self they are presenting (such a small slice, in most cases, more like a sliver), the messages they've received from their friends, their friends themselves, the way they identify their religion and political persuasion. It's funny to me that these are the two attributes people are asked to identify in the very short space alloted to the introductory lines. Many people I know--and their friends--don't answer these; the space is blank under their name. Others give a provocative response--"really, really liberal" or "what I'm in the mood for" (as though one might be in the mood to be, say, a libertarian). I myself initially identified myself as a "secular humanist," the clunky term I've decided best describes my "religious beliefs" but then thought better of it and deleted it. It seemed to ask more questions than it answered, even to me. I didn't like its definitiveness. In fact, I prefer some of the wackier, looser identifiers I've seen: "Hebe," for example, and "not that into it." I especially love that one, which echoes the popular self-help slogan adopted by single women in the wake of Sex and the City: Take that, Religion--I'm just not that into you.

I am also interested in how many people identify their birthday but leave out the year--allowing them to receive "happy birthday" messages from friends and acquaintances (if you know it's someone's birthday you feel like a heel ignoring the information) but preventing anybody from actually knowing how old they are. Some of these ageless Facebookers are perfectly willing to acknowledge they're "on the prowl," or interested in "a good time"; they just don't want anybody getting into their business and knowing, say, that they happen to be 42. Weird. And the Scrabulous--I have developed a soft spot for a few people I was not friends with at various stages of my life but have been Facebook-friended by when I saw that they too were, should we say, passionate about my stress release du jour. I have not played Scrabulous with any of these people, but just picturing them at their desks somewhere out in the world sliding tiny computerized letter squares across a game board makes me like them more. I guess that's weird too--for me.

But the weirdest thing of all is that you can actually get a real sense of who somebody is by looking at this thing--or who they've become, I guess, as I'm more interested in the pages of people from my past than in those of you I speak to almost every day. I'm about as interested in Nicole's Facebook page as I am in a wad of discarded gum in the gutter; I may never have even read it. I should link to it here, but I'm kind of over the linking thing; it's not for me. But the friend from my third grade Bluebird troop? The one who could not, really could not learn her multiplication tables and became a Stanford-educated economist in the Middle East? Her, I am very interested in. How did this happen? It amazes me. But what amazes me more than her transformation from 3 x 3 = 10 to Doctor is the fact that I know this at all. This is way beyond yearbooks. This is the future. Three dimensional, or more--back in time and forward fast. A step on the way to the future, I suspect. It really kind of blows my mind.