AARP The Magazine - July/August 2009

tors like “Danzel Washington” and “Turner Tina” don’t count—joined my coterie.

Barbara was unimpressed. “You know what you are?” she said the next day out by the pool when I excitedly told her the news. “You’re a Facebook slut. Why don’t you ever have a real conversation with a real person?

“Someone like me, for instance.”
Ouch. Ever since I had signed on to Face-
book a few months earlier, caught up in a
nationwide craze that has made boomers
the website’s fastest-growing demographic,
Barbara had been poking fun at my habit.
But now she was rolling out the heavy artil-
lery, and I didn’t have an answer. I smiled,
I prevaricated, I acted cute—all the time
thinking, “How can I tactfully slip away and
check to see if I have any more new friends?”
At that point I was still in a very early stage of
Facebook addiction: denial.

How did this happen? How did I transform virtually overnight from a relatively serious person into a shameless celebrity groupie? Throughout my career as a writer and editor, I’ve met countless A-list celebrities and worked closely with more than a few. I’m usually the epitome of journalistic reserve when I encounter a famous person in my work. But in the bizarre, uninhibited world of Facebook, another side of my personality emerged: the part that likes to appear as if I’m someone I’m really not. And that was just the beginning.

What’s
the
Diff?

had been stuck during the ceremonies in a
highway underpass. Another, more tongue-
in-cheek group appeared that day celebrat-
ing “Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat.”
Shortly before our Inauguration Day
adventure I challenged Clay to a race to see
who could accumulate the most friends.
Clay was a Facebook newbie, but as a
37-year-old photographer with Facebook-
ready friends all over the world, he had a
huge advantage, and within days he had
chalked up 100 friends and counting.
Meanwhile, despite all the media reports
about the recent surge of interest in Face-
book among boomers, I was struggling to
find prospects. For my first 100 friends,
I scooped up all the family members my
brother Dennis, an early Facebook user, had
recruited; dozens of colleagues at work; and
a host of writers and editors I knew who
were also early adopters. Then it got harder.
I checked my high-school classmates on
Facebook. (Who are these people?) Col-
lege classmates? (Ditto.) I trolled page
by page through my old address books,
looking for e-mail addresses of long-lost friends. (Nada.)
After a few weeks of watching Clay pull ahead, I started
taking anyone who was a friend of a friend and didn’t
look like an ax murderer. My most successful ploy was to
poach friends from other friends’ lists. That’s how I landed
Hugh Two, who was the friend of a friend from Califor-
nia with more than 2,000 celebrities on his list. I was in
Facebook Heaven.

Eventually Clay’s interest slackened. When I e-mailed to tell him I had reached 300 friends, he wrote back, “You’re such a Facebook stud,” and silently conceded defeat. This

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FACEBOOK.COM
Thousands of
special applications;
users can upload
unlimited photos.

MYSPACE.COM
Member blogs;
top artists’ songs
are sold through
MySpace Music.

LINKEDIN.COM
Focus on
professional
contacts; minimal
personal info.

AARP.ORG/
ONLINECOMMUNITY
Profiles of members
in your area; discus-
sion groups on
topics ranging from
health and family to
money and leisure.

When I first started Facebooking, I felt as if
I had stepped through the looking glass into a
world filled with people I knew, or pretended
to know, sharing their most intimate secrets
for all the world to see. I was fascinated by
how easy it was to distribute photos, videos,
and last night’s Jay Leno clips, chronicle the
details of your daily life, and create groups of
like-minded oddballs (one group called itself
“ 1,000,000 to Get Julian Schnabel to Button
His Shirt Up”). Sure, this kind of open forum
led to a lot of narcissistic blathering, but it also generated
some delightfully off-the-wall wackiness. On Inauguration
Day my stepson, Clay, and I got caught in a large crowd and
struggled for hours in the freezing
cold to get through the purple-
ticket gate to hear President
Obama’s address. The next day a
new group on Facebook, called
“Survivors of the Purple Tunnel
of Doom,” detailed the woes of the
thousands of ticket holders who