The Party Line (Iris)

I spent the evening of November 6th on my laptop, watching the results coming in from multiple news stations. I was on the phone with my best friend Nat, who lives in Massachusetts. We were comparing our finds, and every so often, one of us would check our Facebook page. My friends and family are almost all Democrats, and as the evening went on, the posts became increasingly excited, celebratory, and, well, intoxicated. I enjoyed reading some out loud to Nat, and we realized that we have very different Facebook friends.

"BBC have now called it as well. Celebrating all by myself at 4 am!" I read from a dear friend who lives in Glasgow.

"The angel of death walks among us," Nat read back.

"Yipppie!" wrote my adorable mother.

"No one is safe, the end times are coming," wrote another one of Nat's friends.

"MY UTERUS IS SAFE! Praise! I love you, Barack! SUCK IT MITTENS!" wrote our very own Jess Drew (this was my favorite post of the night.)

"I'm moving to Canada," said ALL of Nat's friends, ever. Which prompted me to ask why the heck Nat has the friends he has- he protests that they are all work friends.

I was struck by the fact that, at this moment, none of us were able to talk calmly about this. I sure wasn't, and I still can't. But I think that's a problem, and I think it's caused both sides to get a little ugly. Yes, we felt this way when Bush one re-election and payback's a bitch. But if I said that to one of Nat's Facebook friends, I'd be starting a flame-war. If I want to change people's minds, I think the first thing I have to do is calm down a little. But how?

Here's my idea- an exhibit that is set up to look like the inside of Facebook, with pictures, articles and status updates all over the walls. I'd be interested to see the connections between people- say, this person has three hundred friends, and two hundred of them posted Democratic status updates. Or, this person had six Democratic friends before the election and only three today. If our social lives are a vast interconnected web, I'd like to see the strings. But more than that, I'd like to see what people hide behind their statuses.

Say you come to a picture of me, with my status update reading "Four more years, bitches!" or something. You'd also see that I have another status update, hidden under that one. You could uncover it somehow, and it would read "I was disappointed by Obama's public speaking skills." Or say that next to me is a profile of a die-hard Republican who happens to support gay marriage and wishes it weren't part of her party's platform. I would want people to see the public face we put on, and the private, more complicated one that we keep to ourselves.

Ideally, you wouldn't be able to enter the exhibit without writing down a secret of your own. You wouldn't necessarily have to show it to anyone, maybe just write it on a card. Then, if you want to see my hidden status, you could insert the card somewhere on my profile, essentially trading your secret for mine. If you wanted to leave your card behind, it could become part of the display, an accumulation of all the things we really feel.