“Facebook . . . is dead to me,” Dustin said, deadpan. He sits across from me, under-caffeinated on a Sunday morning. We’re the first two to arrive for our weekly group hangout at New Wave Cafe in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. This café has black-and-white checkered floors that rarely get mopped. I am trying to guess how long it’s been since they were last cleaned until Dustin speaks again.
“I just…never go on there anymore,” he says. “It’s like a swamp, or a jungle, or a black hole of doom. I just can’t see why anyone would allow themselves to get sucked in.”
What he says is somewhat true. When our little coffee meet-up began a few months ago, we were all so nervous about talking to each other and becoming friends that we gazed at the screens of our phones, checking Facebook, then Instagram, then Facebook again. When we got off of our social networks, we started taking photos of one another until we were comfortable actually looking into each other’s eyes without screens.
Jonathan, the photographer of the bunch, shows me the nine photo editing apps that he has on his black-encased iPhone. I’ll turn away from him for only a moment, and then look back to see him photographing the wall, or the floor, or some other flat, artificial space that will eventually become an image, another texture for him to transform into something square and Insta-picture-perfect.
Jonathan loves Instagram. The tiny pictures he captures with his iPhone become part of the endless stream of moving images. Instagram offers many visual options for expressing one’s feelings, from hearts and emoji smiles to purple-horned devils. I don’t totally understand what pleasure Jonathan derives from participating in Instagram’s tiny noisy photography pricks that pierce like his many tattoos, across his body, underneath the chest hair that I see poking out from under his white v-neck t-shirt. Then Dustin interrupts my thoughts again, this time with a declaration.
“Facebook is gone, forever,” he announces.
It’s a lie though, because he has a presence on there and it floats around, just existing. He is inactive on Facebook, but Facebook is not gone at all. To prove it, I take out my phone and locate Dustin’s Facebook cover photo — an image of two leopards lounging in bed with a 70s movie star, her long blonde hair gently brushing the giant cats’ whiskers. In his profile pic, he looks like a totally ridiculous hipster, posing with cheap red sunglasses on. He’s standing next to his friend Sam, aka screen name Sammy Struts, who also decides to show up for our Sunday coffee get-together. He is skinny as a rail, with delicate features on his long face, product-infused black hair, and long, spindly fingers.
When Sammy arrives, he barely greets us, instead heading right to the coffee line. He beckons me to come stand with him; there’s something he wants to show me. Together we huddle over his iPhone, staring at a GIF that he says is actually “him in llama form.” Together we watch the two-second head swishing motions of the llama roving across his iPhone screen.
“Have you ever seen anything so accurately me on the Internet?” he asks, wide-eyed, staring at me and then back at his screen and then at the enormous line that’s getting shorter the longer we stand in it.
The GIF llama has giant oversized teeth, and as it walks in a half circle its neck waves back and forth. Sammy is overjoyed, gripping his iPhone in the air as high up as the GIF llama that nods its head, sassy, strutting, demanding the attention of Internet onlookers and now, people at the cafe. I smile and watch the GIF animation for a fifth time, allowing its early cinematic movements to burn into my brain. I have no choice but to watch Sammy; I left my iPhone at the table.
That’s when Adele walks in. She thinks she’s better than all of us because, and she admitted this to me, she still owns an ancient flip phone. She is too cool to be accessible. But maybe she’s got a good strategy going. Sometimes, it’s better not to send thoughts in tiny, screened bubbles; it could be better to spend more time constructing thoughtful texts using the slow flip phone buttons. Either way, she’s reserved about digital communication and I like that about her.
Adele sits down next to Nellie, Dustin’s girlfriend. I smile at Adele; I’ll confess here that we dated briefly. She smiled and winked back at me in that sweet way that only past lovers do, suggestive but not demanding.
It’s strange because I’m sitting there with Adele and Nellie, but I can only see Adele. I can’t see Nellie, who is mostly looking at her phone. I only know her through our texting conversations and the selfies she posts on Instagram. She rarely shares her thoughts in person. I think of her phone screen as a mirror of herself — like a Cindy Sherman photograph or a Renoir rendering of a young woman gazing into a mirror. Except that’s not her at all. She screens herself, and though she has a lot to say for some reason she doesn’t tell us. Instead, we look on at her selfies, fascinated. Only Adele and I are present today.
Crystal Paradise is a weekly column published every Tuesday by Los Angeles-based writer Alicia Eler that navigates the naturally occurring weirdnesses that spark at the intersection of art, technology and travel.
Also in Crystal Paradise:
Water Watcher: Seeking The Substance That Makes Us Human
Art, Identity, And The Digital Gaze
