Both Oars In Ransomed at Fifteen

Apr 16, 2010

 

I ransomed my daughter from Facebook for $500. Technically, since I paid her to delete her page, I ransomed her from her virtual self. Facebook just provided the safe house where her virtual self held her hostage. I am not sure which one of us feels more relieved, but I am sure it was the best $500 I have ever spent. 

I think the joint last straw was seeing a young woman on South Beach holding a camera phone at arms length from her face taking a picture of herself and then pressing buttons feverishly on her phone. She repeated the process over and over. Each time, she would carefully scrutinize the picture before crazily pressing buttons on her phone.

I asked my daughter, who will remain nameless because she is now a much more private person, “What’s that woman doing?” She replied without hesitation, “She’s taking pictures of herself and posting them to her Facebook to let her friends know where she is and how much fun she is having.”  

Oh, how quickly and painfully the irony sunk in: a beautiful young woman, on a beautiful day, on a beautiful beach, sitting isolated by herself, taking self-portraits to share with all her beautiful friends on Facebook. It was amazing. I am pretty sure that the Great Expectations-esque scene greased the way for my fifteen year old daughter to hit the delete button. 

My daughter readily admits that the $500 was just a good excuse to do what she knew was the right thing all along. Moments after executing her alter self, she rattled off several reasons why it was a no good thing. “People just add people they don’t know so their friend count goes up. They doctor their pictures, making use of editing sites to change their eye color and erase pimples or blemishes. You can even airbrush yourself.” She speaks with the clarity of a former smoker ripping on a cigarette company. 

She admitted, “Once you post a new picture, you have to see how it stacks up against your friend’s last posting. You are dying for feedback. You check over and over to see if people respond. Am I cute? Isn’t this a funny face? And when you don’t get any [feedback], you feel less important and uglier.” Although recovering quickly, she seemed painfully aware that Facebook isolates more than it connects by adding to the teenage angst of feeling inadequate. 

Eerily, Facebook offered my daughter the opportunity to visit a “self-help site for managing time” when she chose “spending too much time on Facebook” as the reason for deleting her page. It seems that Facebook, like the casinos that post notices for Gamblers’ Anonymous just inside the front door, knows they are presenting a potentially addictive and harmful product.

I can only imagine that if you ask for help, they send you to chat room or an email sp upi can connect with friends with similar issues—kind of a like a casino offering you a few free chips to pass the time before the next GA meeting starts up. I am glad my daughter declined the help and opted for going cold turkey instead.
  
In fact, I couldn’t be happier that she has sworn off all social networking sites beyond her email account. But, her older brother is a bit ticked. He had deleted his page weeks before on his own. He was prompted to end his dalliance with self-promotion and trivialization when he had trouble ending a day of relief work in Haiti with updating his Facebook page. “I just couldn’t stand the insincerity of it all.”

When he heard about the $500, he screamed, “You didn’t give me anything for dumping my page!” Like the father of the prodigal son, I told him that I was proud of him, but I was not going to give him the same deal. After all, $500 is a lot of money.

$500 is a lot of money, especially when there are 10 million teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 on Facebook. So, I have an idea. I noticed that my daughter immediately began spending her ransom money. Maybe President Obama could propose a 5 billion dollar stimulus package to provide each teenager that dumps his or her Facebook page with $500. I guarantee the money would go directly into the economy.

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