Mathilda Is

Facebook and the rest of the Web 2.0 world have changed a lot of things, revolutionizing the way we communicate and how we maintain our social networks. To keep up, we are living dual lives. We constantly interrupt our engagement in the physical world that surrounds us by logging on to this massive other galaxy, accessed through the tiniest pieces of equipment and existing somewhere that no one has ever really been, a place where we remotely build and maneuver representations of ourselves.

There’s been a lot of talk about the social network side of this whole phenomenon. I spend more than enough time thinking about how to appropriately merge my real life exchanges with what are quickly becoming the social norms of the e-world. Should I “friend” that person I just met? If I friend him too soon, will he think I’m weird? If I wait, will he forget me?

Though at times eliciting confusion, the social functions of these relatively new internet communities are unfolding fairly straight-forwardly. But what about their impact on self-perception? Facebook and its step-child, Twitter, have changed the way I think about myself on a moment-to-moment basis. The Facebook “status” feature, the sole component of sites like Twitter, invites people to state not just what they are doing at that particular moment, but also what they’re thinking about, what they need people to know, and what they want people to wonder about.

This “status” indicator has disturbingly permeated my life. I find myself walking down the street thinking, “Mathilda is going to the grocery store. Mathilda is very pleased with her grades. Mathilda is so happy that winter is ending.” My thoughts, these very personalized bits (most of which I never utter), are transferred into the third-person for easy digestion by friends, colleagues, and lots of other people who I barely even know, whether I ever even post them on Facebook or not. By constantly conjugating my train of thought, I’m directing the timbre of my own self-perception for another audience.

And so it goes: Mathilda is thinking about Paris. Mathilda is avoiding the question. Mathilda wonders why we can’t just talk face-to-face.

I want to take a step back. What are all the things that we’re not saying on these sites? And for all the things we are saying, why are we so willingly and excessively disclosing them? This constant status update is part and parcel of the transformation of social networking and the reframing of communications into instant headlines, but how much does this venture into how we define ourselves individually?

Mathilda is walking home wondering.

Verde Que Te Quiero Verde

As a student of psychology, I learned that the human brain needs categorization for comprehension. As an example, children formulate a definition of a "tree" based on the elm tree outside of their Massachusetts school or the palm trees lining the Los Angeles boulevard near home. Then, when an unfamiliar tree comes into the picture, it is at first foreign, undefinable, until that category of "tree" is expanded to include this new meaning and all the features that accompany it.

It turns out that we rely on this categorization mechanism to process nearly all the information that we encounter. Faces, places, names and objects all filter through a complex series of categorical worlds until suddenly (hopefully) a match can be made. Recognition follows shortly after.

Paradoxically, what enables us to pick up where we left off day after day also binds us to a strangely limiting need to process events and features based on what we have experienced and seen before. For relationships, this means an inevitable and awkward consideration of who we are currently dealing with in relation to those we have dealt with before, in other situations, in other moments, in seemingly disconnected scenarios. The result is a perpetual string of relational ties that enables us to make some sense of a situation that would otherwise be intangible, incomprehensible, and wonderfully, beautifully new. Why do we fight against this relational activity that our brains immediately plunge into? Why do we desire original experiences yet immediately rationalize them through comparison to anything that shares a feature or two with what we have, momentarily, found exhilaratingly fresh?