The Variance

Every time I go back to Kuching I can't help but think of my friends, and how different we're all growing up to be.

I have a friend who is taking the bar exam in half a year's time. I was there when his plan was to be: "a lawyer! I never want to be a politician la!" and then in the last election, when his father was dropped in favour of another party representative, he got so hopping mad that he changed his mind. He's now working towards being a representative - and he probably would be, in due time.

I have another friend who won a Petronas scholarship to France. He spends most of the year in Lyon, lives in a studio apartment, and thinks the French are an unfriendly bunch. I think he has a bright future ahead of him.

Another friend has graduated with a technical diploma, and is working as an air-cond repairman. When we were in St Thomas's he was one of those who got consistently good results.

Another is the frontman of his own band.

Yet another took out a PTPL loan to cover his college tuition, and then dropped out of the aforementioned college, degree-less and in debt. He currently works at a paint shop, paying back his loans, biding time before he can go to school again. A mutual friend reports that he seems 'angry at the rest of the world'.

I hesitate to say that my friends are in a better or worse state that I am, because life is long, and all kinds of things may happen in between. The 'ones-with-a-future' may stumble and make mistakes; the 'ones-who-are-down' may come to be at the right place at the right time. Two of my friends in St Thomas's, whom we once knew as rich, are no longer so. Their families have experienced a reversal in fortune. And it's humbling when you hear of such things.

I mean: when we were young, we all thought we were equals, didn't we? We all looked the same. We were placed in this artificial environment, where our choices didn't affect us nearly as badly as they would outside. And in the Malaysian public education system, at least, we're put in an environment that consists of kids from all kinds of socio-economic backgrounds, and then we're led to believe that we are all equal.

When we leave school, our paths diverge. We fly apart like agitated atoms released from a magnetic field (ooh, nerdy analogy, that). But it's true, isn't it? Where before we were held together - just barely - by the institution, now there are large gaps between former friends. A doctor cannot so easily mix with a mechanic; or perhaps a hardworking mechanic cannot so easily mix with a drunk doctor (you never know!) and this is how we grow up. Nothing to it, I suppose.

I know that I'm probably talking about obvious, dumb things, but it's never really struck me till I got back late last year. The variances between me and my friends are starting to be large enough for me to notice, every single holiday I have, I go back and something has changed. And it's scary. Inevitable, but still frightening in its own way.

When I was in San Francisco I met up with and talked to Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute for the Future of The Book. We both gave talks on very similar things - the need for a usable, open system for publishing; the huge importance of having such a system before the current models of traditional publishing collapsed. He was arguing for it; I was among those building it. The difference was that he was 63 years old, and I but 20.

My grandfather is only a couple of years older than Bob Stein. I don't think he knows of the things I currently do. Truth be told, I never considered the idea that there were people of his generation who were living on the bleeding edge. And yet there we were - two people from two completely different generations, talking and thinking about the same things. I was struck by how different contemporaries can be - notwithstanding that they come from different places, and were involved in different things. And I thought: this is probably how it's going to be like for my friends and I, and even more so for the people I meet in uni, when we are 60 years old and retired and looking back on life.

The variance is here, and it is large, and it is growing wider still.

Why I'm Not On Facebook

I'm on my way back to Kuching and I'm stuck in a queue at the Tiger Airways check-in desk. There's a woman behind me talking very loudly on the phone.

"Hello!" she says, in Mandarin, "Yes hello Mr Wong I'm going back to Kuching now. Oh no the last person said that he wants to buy the unit for four fifty. Oh wait you're from Kuching too? Ahh! I didn't know that! You need ... oh you need the office number? I tell you what, I can't go online right now - but if you send me a message on Facebook I'll get back home tonight and send you a message with all the contact information. Yes, just find me on Facebook - you're my friend, right?"

I turn around, balancing the trio of bags I'm lugging around with me. The woman is in her late 20s, or early 30s, I can't be sure. She has laugh lines around her eyes. I look down, and I realize she's in office attire.

People making business transactions through Facebook, I thought, Waddya know?

*

Almost everyone I know has the same reaction when I tell them that I don't have a Facebook account. "What?!" they say, incredulous, "Why?". This has happened enough times that I'm sick of it, and I think it'd do to explain - just once - why I'm not on Facebook. Hopefully I won't ever need to explain my stand again. (Also: most people - after learning that I'm not on Facebook, try to convince me that I should sign up, and it'll only take a couple of seconds, and that it's free, and you know - why not?. Hopefully this post gives them pause).

I have a couple of reasons. I'll begin with the most mundane.

1.
I come to Facebook from Friendster. Friendster was bad. I spent two years of my life tweaking my profile and uploading awesome pictures of myself and writing testimonials for other people (and zealously watching my testimonial count) and then Friendster died. So I was really lazy to do that all over again, on a new social network I wasn't sure would last. My sister Charlene was lazy too. She's not on Facebook because she thinks "it's a waste of time".

But I'll admit - I was wrong about the first bit. I was wrong on Facebook not lasting. Facebook is cool, smart, and growing strong.

2.
I'm in computer science, and that means that I spend most of my time on a computer. I work on my computer, I study at my computer, and I relax doing stuff on my computer (though not always - I like taking long walks, lately).

I probably won't be as productive if I had a Facebook account. Facebook is incredibly addictive. And so it's weird - people say "you're in computing but you're not on Facebook?!" as if it's a crime - but of the people I know without Facebook accounts, almost all of them are CompSci majors. There's a simple reason for that: we can't turn our computers off to study, and so we value the ways in which we spend our computer time more than most other people do.

3.
In actual practice, staying out of Facebook isn't as bad as one may imagine. You don't know everything your friends are up to, but that's alright - if the experience was awesome they'd tell you it was awesome, and you'd be able to judge from the light in their eyes and tone of voice the degree of truth to what they're saying. And if it wasn't awesome, then they just won't tell you.

Being outside Facebook does another weird thing to you: it forces you to really listen to your friends when you meet up. Because you're not on the network, you can't tell yourself: 'oh I know what you think of so and so' based on a 200-word status update; instead you ask 'what do you think of so and so?' and then you really listen because you can't pretend to know. Sometimes this is annoying, because you're missing out on a readily available stream of information on the people you care most about. But most of the time it works out: you don't need so much information; you only need to know about your closest friends. And nobody has more than a handful of close friends. (By extension, updates from the rest are more noise than anything else.)

The other objection that my friends have with me is "but how are we going to stay connected?!" And my answer to that is: email me. I check my email on a daily basis, and I respond, archive, or delete email within 12 hours of reception. It's the only way I can handle school, work, and membership in four separate mailing lists.

4.
I keep two separate identities on the web. Most of my work with eBook and format spec groups happen under the name Eli James. I run Pandamian under Eli James, because the name carries some influence now in eBook circles. Facebook forces me to consolidate my two identities. I can't really do that.

5.
There's this thing Facebook does when you're about to delete your account. They say: x, y and z won't be able to connect with you if you quit Facebook! Are you really really sure?

I think that's morally despicable. Facebook's using my friends to ransom me to stay with the site. I understand why they're doing it, but it's a little like inviting me to a party and threatening me with my pals to get me to stick around.

6.
Facebook makes you lonely.

I'm not the first one to make this observation: Daniel Chong tweeted recently that teenagers, today, are the most connected in the history of mankind, and yet also the most lonely. I've thought about what he said for a bit, and I think he has a point. It's probably not a coincidence.

There's a simple reason for this, I think: when you're surfing Facebook you're looking at photos of beautiful people having fun. Because that's what people upload to Facebook, right? You see people posing in exotic places, or traipsing down cornfields, or partying their heads out at clubs and bars and other glamorous places. And because you're alone when you're surfing your social network, you feel left out. You feel as if there's a perpetual party going on, with somebody you know in it, and it's happening somewhere in the city but you're not invited.

Except that this isn't true. You just feel that way because all you see on Facebook are event pictures. And it's a warped view of the world. The true things that matter in life happen far away from event photos, and by extension, from the bluster of your social network. They happen in the private space between two lovers, or in the silent zone of the solitary builder. (Zuckerberg himself wrote the first version of Facebook in a month). Nobody changed the world by hanging out on Facebook all day long. And if you do so, you'll end up feeling rather lonely. For little marginal benefit.

7.
I'm not as connected because I'm not on Facebook. But I'm also not as lonely; I don't feel an urge to go hang out and take pictures to stave off a growing boredom (or to keep up with the perpetual party going on in the network). I take pleasure in spending long hours with a small group of friends, building things that matter to the world. Partly because that's cool, but mostly because it's fun.

I think that's a fairly good trade. Probably not for everyone, but good enough for me.