Facebook

by Donna Schoenkopf

(Just think of this column as a stream of consciousness exercise. I am sick of trying to rearrange it.)

I have begun my journey into Facebook.

I went into it kicking and screaming because I am an old person. We generally do not take kindly to newfangled things. The old way was just fine, thank you very much.

I would send my missives via Pony Express or telegraphy if I could. Naaahhhh. I’m not THAT much of a technophobe.

But, because I am a human being, alive in 2010, in the United States of America, AND living in the boonies with no husband (and soon no children, as John will be returning to California in a matter of a couple of weeks), I must find my community somewhere.

Ishi, the last Yahi

We are herd animals, after all.

Remember the book, Ishi, The Last Yahi?

You don’t?

Well, back in 1911 an Indian man, in tatters and in shock, was found by a bunch of butchers (the meat-cutting kind), near a corral at which they were working.

It turns out he was a Yahi from the Yana tribe that had lived around the Oroville region in Northern California. AND, it turns out he was the last remaining member of his tribe.

He became the focus of some anthropologists who wanted to study him. And they did. They found out all about him, hunting, housing, food, clothing ... everything.

Everything except his name. For a while they thought his name was Ishi, because when they asked him his name, that was the word he said. Later they discovered that Ishi meant man. He eventually explained that he had no name, because “there are no people to name me.” (My political science professor said that in the Yana tribe, one never spoke one’s own name.)

I think that was the single most poignant thing I got from the book. It turned my head around. Language. Meaning. Relationship. It’s a huge concept.

Well, back to my point about us being herd animals. It turns out, sociologically speaking, that if a group of human beings have less than forty people, the members of that group cannot survive past the members currently living. By virtue of the accidents of a cruel world, eventually all members will die. And when Ishi’s tribe was massacred at Three Knolls, their fate was sealed. Little by little the tribe became smaller and smaller until Ishi was the only one left.

I cry as I write these words.

I cry for myself. And for you. I cry for us.

My darling friend, Carole, knows the power of human relationships. She travels a lot and always uses people to describe the places she’s been. Once I asked her what the house looked like in which she was staying in southern France, and she had to pause and think about it.

She asked if I would be okay when son John returned to California. She worried that I would be lonely and sad.

Yes. I would be fine, I replied. I am a bit of a hermit and love the solitude of my home and land. I think and feel and go slowly through my day, savoring every minute.

But I do need human contact. Even though I am not frothing at the mouth for the touch or voice of another person, I find myself calling or writing or joining a group.

AND I have human technology. I can see around the world instantly through television. (What a teleportation device, eh?) I can talk to people anywhere in the world as soon as they answer their phone. (I can see them, too, with Skype.) I can write to people instantly through e-mail, not needing my manservant to deliver my hand-sealed love letter on parchment through the streets of London, or the Pony Express, or telegraphy, or the United States Postal Service to fly my letter across the country for forty-four cents. Yeah. Instant e-mail. No muss, no fuss. And no waste to bury our world.

(But my darling Carole still sends me large envelopes full of newspaper articles, pictures, doodads, remembrances. Things she’s touched. Once her son Benton told me that she always took a bite out of the sandwich she made for his school lunch. When the other kids asked why there was always a bite missing he said that his mom wanted him to know she was thinking of him. Once, when she and her darling Jim spent the night at my house, I went into my kitchen the next morning and looked out the window and there was a sign under my pine tree, in big letters, that said, “Good morning, Donna!”

I love Carole.)

But I digress.

What I want to say is that the human race is becoming one giant entity, borders and distinctions disappearing.

We are intermingling. We are intermarrying. We conduct business with each other around the globe.

A wonderful symbol of this is our boy, Barack Obama. He was born in Hawaii, the Crossroads of the Pacific, where East meets West, of a mother and father distant in birth from each other. They created a person who understands places, people, things, in ways that most people can’t. He is the Future.

And isn’t he beautiful?

We Insulated Americans sometimes wonder why he tries so hard to have everyone come together to make policy, saying, “What the hell is he trying to do? He’s DITHERING.”

But he’s not. He’s the forerunner of the way the world will be someday. It cannot be any other way. Unless we come to consensus as a means of getting things done, we’ll destroy ourselves.

But I digress.

This is about Facebook.

I am dipping my pretty little toe into it, and finding that my whole self has been swallowed up.

Not time-wise. I refuse to become so addicted I cannot live in the “real” world. But, I find myself in a larger, more inclusive world of friends. Well-known friends, long lost friends, and friends of friends, whom I do not know.

I have power. I can say any old thing and out it goes into my community and the community of my friends.

My first inclination on Facebook was to begin with politics, because politics IS interaction between people. I know it has come to mean something else. In today’s parlance it means the devious manipulating of facts to get a point won.

But that is not what it means to me. To me it means working, communicating, playing, solving problems together. I love politics.

My first “share” was about the election in Massachusetts. I was horribly shaken by Teddy Kennedy’s seat being taken by a handsome guy in a pickup truck.

Gee. That sounds familiar. (You know, most of us thought George Bush was handsome until we got to know him and when the smirk and the goofy look on his face was seen while his idiotic words tumbled out of his mouth, we saw that, actually, he looked like Alfred E. Neuman.) I think the new senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, will eventually look like a goofball to most of us. Just wait. I am never wrong. Well, hardly ever.

But I digress again.

I want to write about how confusing Facebook is and how I can’t really manage it. And how I don’t know where “threads” go. And what the hell is a News Feed? And why can’t I find anything? And why does a reply go everywhere sometimes and only to my e-mail other times?

And where is there help for people who don’t even know what question to ask?

The problem is language.

(Ah, Ishi, I know how you feel.)

I don’t know the language of Facebook. I can’t express what I want.

I am alone in my confusion.

Do NOT tell me to go to the Help section. That’s like reading the answer in the very language I don’t understand. It is maddening and lowers my self-esteem.

I’ve asked my children. They try to help because they because they are good. But they get frustrated and I don’t want to get on their nerves.

So I suppose I’ll just paddle along, writing stuff that goes I don’t know where.

And I was JUST getting used to e-mail.

Damn.

Okay, that’s enough for now.

Aloha ’oe.

Until we meet again ...

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