The Desert of My Dreams

You couldn’t figure out the “World’s Theory” for yourself? It’s just common sense. Anybody knows, ya gotta keep your worlds apart.

- George explaining to Jerry the “World’s Theory” on Seinfeld – The Pool Guy

If you’re a Seinfeld fan like me (as in you’d rather re-watch Seinfeld over and over again as opposed to watching the crap sitcoms that are on TV right now. TV writers I’m looking right at you – maybe you should go on strike FOREVER), you’re probably familiar with the “World’s Theory.” When Jerry suggests that Elaine take Susan (George’s fiancé) to an exhibit at the Met, George goes nuts stating that his worlds were colliding. For George, Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer represented the world in which “independent George” thrives. By bringing Susan into that world, George claimed that not only did “worlds collide,” they were “killing independent George.”

The worlds collide bit wouldn’t be as funny if there wasn’t any truth to it. We all have different sides of our lives and personalities that we share in different contexts. There are different sides of me that my family, co-workers, and friends see in those different social situations. And that’s the beauty of real-life social interaction – we’ve evolved enough (well, most of us anyway) to know when to bring up something at work or how to act in front of our parents as apposed to our friends.

When I joined Facebook back in early 2005, it was just taking off at American colleges and universities. To get in, you had to be in school (with a .edu email) and at one of the RIGHT schools. At the time, I was in my first year of grad school at Michigan so I qualified. For a certain set of my grad school friends (read – the nerdier ones), Facebook became yet another way to talk about that experience of going to a small grad program. I had little poke fights with people – even though we really didn’t know what the poke feature was all about (and to this day, we still don’t know why its there). Our walls became semi-private places to share inside jokes about whatever off-the-wall information theory we were exposed to that week. If I was still up at midnight on a Monday night finishing up the week’s 502/503 homework, so were many of my friends. And I’d know that because I’d have immediate responses to my wall posts. We’d come in to our 9 am 503 section sleepy-eyed but knowing that we could have had a little more rest had we laid off the Facebook pokes and wall posts. For me, Facebook has always been about encapsulating part of my grad school experience and a way to keep in touch with a certain set of my grad school friends. Unlike my blog, my Facebook profile was only visible to my friends and anybody who went to school at Michigan. Facebook felt like a private online playground – I could be as goofy as I am with my friends in real-life because nobody else was watching.

Fast-forward to summer 2006 when Facebook opened up its doors to anyone. No school or work network? No problem. Umm, but we did have a problem. My worlds were colliding*! People I worked with at Microsoft started adding me as a “friend.” “Well, yes we’ve attended the same meeting a few weeks ago but does that make us friends?” Or, “You expect me to approve your friend request after what you said at THAT meeting?” Acquaintances aren’t friends and neither are most co-workers. Whether online or in real-life, the context of work makes it really weird to hang-out with people you work with. And not only was I being asked to essentially hang out online with people I worked with, I was being asked to expose them to my grad school world. Most of my grad school contacts were strong ties and most of my co-workers are weak ties. And its not like you can reject a coworker’s friend request – that’s a great signal to send at work – “Yes, I may work with you but I don’t like you.”

Some of you may point out that I can always limit my profile to acquaintances and co-workers but that’s just more work. I really don’t want to manage a limited profile and try to make judgments about whom of my co-workers are “safe” enough to see my full profile and whom are not. When it comes to work and Facebook, I’ve essentially come to terms with my worlds colliding. I don’t seek out coworkers but I don’t reject their friend requests, either.

To make matters worse, several of my grad school professors started adding me as friends around this time as well. Let’s just say Classroom Noor and Hanging-out-in-Ann-Arbor Noor weren’t the same. On the one hand, I was flattered when some of my profs still remembered me (that’s saying a lot at a research university) but I was still scrambling thinking, “Oh shit! I hope none of my wall posts say anything bad about that class!” But just like with co-workers, I figured, “Oh what the hell, sure we’re friends. I’ll try to forget about that A- you gave me and that awful group you put me in.”

Fast-forward to this summer when one of my cousins found me on Facebook. That single friend request started a barrage of friend requests from a number of my cousins, many of whom have somehow learned about Facebook. Most of my extended family lives in the Middle East. I’m lucky if I see them once a decade (seriously). I’m not that close to any of my cousins (as the Olsons would say, distance matters!). My worlds were colliding yet again! Not only were my cousins being exposed to my grad school world – they came into it with a different cultural context. In light of the differences between my two cultures (American and Arab), I wondered how they’d interpret my profile, photos, and wall posts. In real-life, I know enough about my two cultures to know what to say and how to act in each distinct context. My Facebook profile doesn’t.

I wish I had a good solution for the worlds collide problem but I don’t. To me, it seems yet another way that social software fails to express the nuances of real-life social interaction. Our daily social interactions are full of millions of IF/ELSE statements that are processed in seconds and without us even recognizing it. It is the sort of complex logic that would take years to code and we still wouldn’t get it right. On the plus side, my worlds colliding on Facebook hasn’t been all bad. In fact, Facebook has humanized some of my co-workers. In recent months, it has also helped me keep in better touch with my family overseas. In the past, my mom was the gatekeeper for that sort of news. Now, I’m all like, “Oh yeah, I knew they had a baby, I just saw the photos online the other day.”

But the final straw occurred yesterday when my aunt’s sister (my aunt through marriage) added me as a friend on Facebook. OH MY GAWD – THE GROWNUPS ARE HERE! WORLDS COLLIDE!

* My former co-worker Anu gets all the credit for appropriately applying the world’s theory to Facebook.

** Apologies for the time stamp of this post. I can’t sleep and when I can’t sleep, I write.