Facebook: A Whole Being Perspective

So….. Facebook! The medium everybody loves to hate. But what is it about Facebook that was so on the money that it viraled so hard across the world, became bigger than many countries, and despite the fact that most of the world couldn't verbalise their fascination by it, and in fact many who still can't? They just call lump it with social media and move on. A number of people still think it's value is in its advertising engine. But well before the Facebook population lured corporate money, there was the value.

So I had what I thought was quite a revealing thought today. And this is it.

Before being dragged kicking and screaming to primary school, I had one life. One innocent world in which all the people I held dear lived in. I know some of you had an imaginary world and imaginary friends, but by and large, we all had just one physical world.

I was then dragged to primary, and once I got over the horror of being left behind my everyone I loved in a cold new foreign world, I accepted my new world. I did that over time, through building friendships based on common interests on the playgrounds, and through meeting other prisoners called classmates, and this world began to become distinctly different from my one home world view. In order to be identifiable in this new school world, I had to display a different set of characteristics than the ones I had in my home world. My name was shortened to one that could be yelled across the courtyard, my interactions were lowered from a mainly adult interaction based level to a more colloquial one, even the language was tailored to suit my new persona. I slowly became two people.

As is the case with most of you, during vacations I went to visit my grandparents and there, I met and formed new "vacation only" relationships that required a different persona to the other two that I had. And so a third me emerged, probably taking advantage of the ability to embellish stories, or some such nonsense that we all got up to as kids.

And as time went and I grew, new situations presented me with challenges to my identity that could only be solved by creating even more personas. Paradoxically, through these multiple personas, my identity was become more clearer. My world view was ever expanding, I was learning more and finding new adventures all over the world. I was becoming more me.

The older I got, the more world I saw and the more personas I developed. Of course, some of these personas could not cross some of the worlds I inhabited, intentionally. For example, I couldn't use some of the colourful language I learnt from rap music in my home world. And so on, and so on.

Through this, the result was I was becoming more of a unique person because of these multiple personalities, but I could never be a whole person because I could only ever be in one world, and that world needed only one persona.

The definition of schizophrenia, by the way, if my theory is correct, would then be having a multitude of these personas showing up at the same time in the same world! But I digress, let me get back on point.

Any one of these personas was not all of me, only a flavour of me, but all of these personas were all of me. So, at any one point in time it was physically impossible for me to be a whole being. But this is the stuff of youngsters, we are hardwired as a species to learn how to deal with the complexity that social interaction brings and over time we learn to navigate through the world safely. The majority of our species, anyway.

And then Mark Zuckerberg, in the dark recesses of a college somewhere in the US asked himself… Okay, maybe not as dramatic or even accurately, nonetheless, go with me….. Mark asked himself

"Is there a way for me to be all my personas at the same time?"

Okay, probably not, he just wanted to ask a few mates if a girl was pretty or not. But inadvertently, he created a world where a person could be all of his or her personas at one point in time. The beauty of Facebook is, he manage to avoid the impossible world of trying to meld all of the worlds that your personas exist in, but rather created a NEW world where it was possible for all the relations that you were accustomed to engaging with, could engage with you. That is the beauty of Facebook. The genius of Facebook is that your one group of relations didn't have to meet ever any of your other group of relations.

That's powerful stuff! I'm going to let that sink in.

You could be ALL of your personas in ONE new place with ALL of your relations using THE ONE persona they were used to you being!

Genius. That is the power of Facebook. It affords you the opportunity to become a whole being.

As we get older, and our sense of adventure and discovery gets replaced with the need for familiarity, safety and rest, (I will attack Maslow's hierarchy of needs on another day) Facebook affords us a world where we can start destroying a number of our personas and replacing them with a single synthesised one that suffices for those multiple physical worlds AND for our one Facebook world. And as our multiple personas become our one Facebook persona which becomes our one main persona, our multiple worlds slowly become our one home world. And our remaining persona is once again our home persona. Not the same home persona we started with, but a persona that brings all of our lived experiences into one. Our only persona, our whole being. Our authentic self.

But what about our work personas? That's still a different persona…. Because of this, I argue, that is not only healthy, but a matter of eventuality that our home persona and our work persona become one. Not to allow the "nosy" busy bodies into our personal lives, but rather to allow ourselves to become and live as a whole being.

be you