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My good friend, who is currently an intern at Newsweek, called me up two nights ago. After I caught her up on the more mundane details of my life, we turned to discussing the internet: "Take a look at my tumblr," she said. "How does it seem to you? I'm worried that I'm coming off as too scatter-brained, like an nineteen-year-old kid who doesn't have her tastes together. It's not cohesive enough, it doesn't have the right aesthetic."
"Well, you are a nineteen-year-old kid. And why are you worrying about aesthetic? Who reads this, anyway?" I asked.
"The people at Newsweek. The ones I really want to impress."

Facebook
"I'm worried about how I come off on my Facebook," I continued.
"What do you mean?"
"I made some new friends this weekend, and they wrote on my wall about certain things that I wouldn't want employers to see. Now I have two choices: I can either delete the wall posts (and risk alienating the people who wrote them), or I can leave them up (and take the chance that an employer might deny me a job.)"

LiveJournal
"Yeah, I guess I don't have that problem," my friend said. "I just post potentially sensitive things in my lj."
"That's a good way to do it."
"I guess. But it's also hard to decide who should read what, even in the LJ community."

last.fm
"I don't have an LJ, but what really drives me crazy is last.fm," I went on.
"Oh last.fm is the worst!"
"I know, right? I completely rely on it now to make my playlists. I use it to find out about new music, instead of talking to people or asking for mix CDs like I did in high school."
"With me," my friend said, "I just can't stop listening to a song until it scrobbles on my profile. I'm obsessed with the number of tracks I've played."

Xanga
"Hey, remember when everyone had a Xanga?" I asked.
"Yeah, haha, that was ridiculous."
"If I remember correctly, you went through several usernames."
"(Yeah, Xanga was wild.)" My friend is maybe a little embarassed by this.
"I wonder what happened to mine? I haven't logged in in years... It used to be so important to me. Did you know that that's how I became friends with Jon? I had always seen him around school in ninth grade, but it wasn't until I started commenting on his Xanga that we actually started talking in person. And now he's one of my best friends; how weird is that?"
"I feel like Xanga changed the way we made friends or met people. Before, if you wanted to get to know someone, you actually talked to them. You found out who they were. Then Xanga came along, and suddenly it was so easy to know someone without saying a word to them."
"I would argue that we don't even know people with this new method. I mean, with Facebook or any of these other websites, you know someone's favorite movies, bands, or authors, but that doesn't mean you know the person."
"Ugh, you don't know how many times I've assumed someone's going to be my best friend based on their profile, and then found out I didn't like them at all," my friend said.
"I believe it."

Twitter
"I hate Twitter," my friend said.
"What, why? You do realize the only reason I got one was because you had one, right?"
"Yeah, and the only reason I have one is because of Newsweek. All journalists feel pressured to get one, just to show that they're on top of everything. But it's so stifling; I can't be consistently witty in 140 characters or less several times a day."
"Right. And half of the things I write on there aren't very important or necessary, in retrospect. And as for seeing what you're up to, I might as well just send you a text message."

The problem
"Or an email."
"Or a Facebook message."
"Or check your scrobbles on last.fm."
"Or read your tumblr."
"Oh my God."
"I know," I said.
"This is terrible!" she said.

The experiment
"What if we just quit everything for a month?" I joked.
"Haha, nice."
"I mean, we can't though. Too much of our lives are on these sites; we need them to find out when things are happening, what our friends are doing."
"Yeah, that's true. ...But maybe that's the problem. We need them."
"What?" I said. She couldn't be serious.
"Let's do this." She was.
"Give everything up?"
"Yeah, just for a month. We would still keep our emails, and of course our phone numbers -- but I feel like anyone who really wants to reach me can do it through means other than Facebook, tumblr, Twitter, last.fm, or LiveJournal, can."
"It would certainly simplify everything."
"And I wouldn't spend hours worrying about how I look to the internet."
"It wouldn't be an issue."
"Excellent."
"Excellent."

__________________________________

So that's the plan. For the next month, my friend and I have blocked ourselves out of: Facebook, LiveJournal, tumblr, Twitter, and last.fm. We're not doing this for Lent, we're not doing it because we need to study for midterms, and we're not doing it because we're addicted. We're doing it because we constantly worry about the online versions of ourselves, and because the very nature of social online networking turns you into a sort of public figure, whether you want to be one or not.

I once said in class that I believed online social interaction was merely an extension of our real-life social interaction. I'm wondering if I should revise this statement. The energy that goes into maintaining an online representation of yourself is different than that of choosing an outfit or making small talk. Or perhaps it's the same kind of energy -- but expending more of it online than you do in the real world is, I think, not necessarily a good thing.

We'll see what happens. All I know is, the past two days have been far less stressful for me than they have been for the handful of friends who have emailed me, frantically asking, "Where did your Facebook go?"