Facebook: I Love You Not

I remember waking up in the morning, showering, dressing, and eating breakfast. I’d sit in the kitchen and spend a good fifteen minutes eating whatever I had, planning out my day, and reading the newspaper, NOW, or an online article; however, things change and so do people. Now my morning routine is different and not so much for the good.

My alarm goes off at 9 am. I hit “snooze” once or twice—not that it does me any good to sleep an extra ten minutes. All it does is prolong the moment I wake up, reach for my trusty laptop and log on to Facebook. “‘Wilkommen bei Facebook’” says the front page. For some irrational reason it seems more pleasant to be greeted in German rather than in English. After perusing my home page for five minutes only to find that my inbox is empty, I log out and then check my ‘real’ E-mail… still nothing. Nothing except a short salutation from my mother telling me to have a nice day with a smiley. Thus is my new routine: log in, log out, log in, log out. Lame.

Although my morning ritual has become quite the norm according to the New York Times, there is something more sociologically and psychologically complicated about this issue. For example, I check my Facebook at least three times a day, four on a bad day. Do I check out of boredom? Maybe, or just maybe I check to see if anyone has either tagged me in a photo or at least commented on one of my own. I won’t deny the fact that this is an egotistical impulse, but I will say that some part of me until lately enjoyed this investigative process.

I’ve been talking about Facebook a lot lately similar to the way I talk about art. Moreover, Facebook makes it even easier for me to talk about other people, their fashion sense, their friends, likes and dislikes, or even their general character. The fact is that it’s too easy to do so and I’ve made a conscious effort to protect myself on Facebook from similar judgments.

When I go out for a night on the town I take at least thirty minutes to wash myself, stare at my face in the mirror from multiple angles, dwell over my receding hairline, and then take an extra half hour and reserve that time to get personal with my wardrobe. I sit and stare (once again) and think about where I’m going and the aesthetic of said location, who I’m going out with, and who will be there. I do this because I know my picture will most likely end up on Facebook the next day if not the same night. “Facebooking” has become cliché, monotonous and is rapidly changing our lifestyles. We’ve become guinea pigs for a sociological virtual interface that allows us to track and document our lives through pictures, status updates, personal information, etcetera, etcetera. But why do we feel the need to document everything? Even complaining about it is somewhat futile because I know that after writing this I’ll most likely check my account. I don’t know about you, but I once enjoyed drinking at the bar, dancing like an idiot Electric Circus style (who doesn’t? If you don’t you’re a liar), and taking inappropriate pictures because it was fun. Now that Facebook is mainstream I’ve turned my back on the camera, social networks, and even some people.

Facebook is like a Peeping Tom: it’s always going to be there, waiting for us to click upload or tag a terrible photo. These were pictures that were once humorous, comical or even ironic. I’d even go as far to say taboo and now these characteristics are being transformed because the public has access to them. We’re exposing ourselves in a new, evidently unorthodox way and it is only time until this exhibitionism will come back to bite us on the ass, or in this case, our face.

I’ve shortened my name, deleted my pictures and increased my privacy settings. You cannot and will not see my wall unless you are one of the few people I allow such access to my information. And this goes for everyone that I don’t know: whoever you are, and I’m not saying this to stroke my ego, pad myself on the back, or even award myself a gold star for being a social networking martyr on Facebook—no—I do this because I ultimately don’t know you, nor do I care to know you unless we meet in person.

Maybe some day we could sit down in my lovely hipster living room complete with a fireplace, retro furniture, and a naked painting of a woman in ecstasy by artist Earl Moran circa 1970. Remember real photo albums and real friendships? I hate going out with Facebook and I do not like living in the shadow of your camera. Be my guest; take photos of me because I love it when you do and I’ve become a natural, but please have some consideration when doing so and leave my face off the Internet. I’d prefer later generations to see my face in various top arts publications and not some virtual medium that exposes my vanity. We’re all vain; we all present ourselves in a certain way, and that’s fine until you post or tag someone else’s face.

My advice to you: because everyone is ignorantly signing on to this social bandwagon of gossip-galore, know-everything-about-your-life, alienating cesspool of moronic, simulated fame because you have like a gazillion “friends,” stop and think about what you’re doing. Are you about to post a stupid photo or update your status with an inside joke from last night’s drunk fest or perhaps some insulting comment about that meaningless person that broke your heart? If so, and better yet, if you are my friend, please don’t because many others and myself have to look at it. People judge; I judge just enough, but I will actually delete you.

Oh, Facebook: so convenient, yet so repulsive at the same time. I wish I could click “Like” on peoples’ status that bear bad news or trivial tid-bits about their failing social lives. “OMG THAT BIZNATCH BROAK MY HART I H8TE HIM SO MUCH OMG LIKE WTF.” This, my informed reader, is an example of how undignified people can be on this dreaded website. One: because they decided to share with the world that they’ve been dumped, which demonstrates their lack of self-control and maturity, and two: because they fail to use proper punctuation and are too lazy to spell simple words. Sigh.

It’s high time for online networking and I am exhausted, emotionally bereft and all I am left with are these simple words. Go ‘book yourself.

Where do aesthetics come from? How do we create an aesthetic and how do we define others in relation to the latter? Why does one aesthetic trump the credibility of another and thus define the other as outdated, irrelevant, or even ugly? Are aesthetics simply concerned with images—Art—or can the term also be applied to lingual communications such as signs or symbols in advertisements?

Above are a few of the countless questions Couch seeks to answer and represent through close introspection and multiple analyses of visual art, fashion, literature, photography, and other artistic mediums. Through critical examinations of varying subjects, Couch strives to articulate and thus evaluate aesthetics and how they affect us emotionally in our day-to-day lives. Couch is the medium between the art critic and the painting, recording details of emotional reactions from the viewer and how the art at hand impacts that individual’s life. Moreover, this emotional reaction to aesthetics or anti-aesthetics, that is debasing elegance and emphasizing the grotesque as the ‘new beautiful’, assists us in shifting our thoughts towards art and society, society and art.

Art is a reaction against society where paradoxically, the former precedes the latter. Couch questions the validity of art in society and the nature of its practices i.e., ‘art for art’s sake’. Has ‘Art’ lost its place in contemporary society, perhaps shadowed by more sophisticated forms of representation: photography and film? The answer is neither yes nor no because we cannot discredit photography and film for they have also evolved and have thus become unique art forms of their own, albeit with the aid of technology. So to say, is art lost, swimming in a bottomless pool of its own self-invented epistemological spectrum, an enigma that has lead to nowhere… at least no place of truth or coherent explanation.

Here is where Couch interjects and attempts to illuminate art and aesthetics and their shifting place in our transient society. It seems the two have uprooted themselves and are now vulnerable to countless subjectivity and seemingly endless discourses of thought and opinion. What is important to note, however, is the idea of art and aesthetics as fleeting, malleable concepts. We live in an age of reform, invention and re-invention; we recycle ideas, create alternate ways of being, and ultimately, conceive new ways of thinking. Why then should art and aesthetics be considered differently? They are not hiding; they perpetually encompass us and confront us in our visually constructed society.