I hope I never meet Shayne Lancaster.
It’s not that I think Shayne is a bad person. In fact, he seems like a pretty cool guy. We both enjoy politics and physics, as well as Disney Films. He seems very religious, so we may clash there, but all in all, we could probably be pretty good friends. However, the most important factor in Shayne and I’s fictional friendship is that we have no less than five friends in common, which is why I know so much about Shayne, and of his existence in the first place.
By all accounts, I should have no opinion of Shayne, and I certainly shouldn’t be able to form an opinion of something as intimate as his religious beliefs, and yet I do. Shayne Lancaster is a person Facebook thinks I may know, and it reminds me of this at every possible opportunity. Every bit of information I know about him is information he’s offered up as possible knowledge, and this is why I don’t want to meet Shayne Lancaster: I don’t want him to be real.
Right now, Shayne Lancaster, as well as a handful of other people with less catchy names, has become a pseudo-mythical figure in my life. As far I know, Shayne Lancaster only lives within the blue-and-white confines where occasionally he makes a comment that I like to a mutual friend. I even have a button I can use to show him this. However, because I have never met him, he has yet to obtain the level of “human being” in my consciousness. I hope he doesn’t, actually, because once I admit that he’s a real person, it suddenly becomes creepy that I’ve spent so much time looking at his Facebook profile.
The theory goes that every human being is connected to every other human being on the planet by no more than six degrees of separation. There are no more than six links between myself and Nelson Mandela, which is fine. I’m okay with accepting that concept, because I can’t see the links with my own eyes. Nelson Mandela and I exist in completely separate spheres, we have absolutely no reason to know each other. However, because I have no idea what the tenuous connection between the two of us is, I can accept Nelson Mandela as a real person more easily than I can Shayne Lancaster, who is by all accounts much closer to me. If anything, Mandela is more real because if I passed him on the street, I’d be able to recognize him, whereas Shayne Lancaster would probably pass by unnoticed.
This is the real defining characteristic of our times: A blurry line of distinction determining who/what is a real person. In my perception, I have complete and total control of Shayne Lancaster’s existence. I click the X in my top-right corner, and Shayne Lancaster, for all intents and purposes, disappears from the Earth. It’s a sick perverse sense of power that I possess, which is weakened when one factors in this trivial detail: He can do the same to me. It’s a power struggle which neither of us care too much about, because we grant the power to each other. This phenomenon, which I have dubbed “The Shayne Lancaster Effect,” is gradually becoming almost universally common as global communication makes the gap between strangers smaller and more visible. Everyone has a Shayne Lancaster in their life, more than likely you have multiple. It only serves to reason that you, then, are the Shayne Lancaster to someone else. We are all Shayne Lancasters. We fear Facebook giving away our privacy, but we offer it to the world willingly, on the base assumption that the person on the other end isn’t real. The Shayne Lancaster Effect is effectively a dehumanization of other people that we allow, because we’re doing it to ourselves.
Today, everyone’s a stalker, mostly accidentally. This disconnect with people we’re only one degree of separation from is necessary if we’re to avoid admitting to ourselves that what we do is, let’s face it, a little creepy. Social networks aren’t really joined to meet new people; they’re to keep tabs on the people we already know. Even those members of the online community with over one thousand “friends” will only communicate with around fifty of them, and more than likely that large number is only there to impress those fifty. We’ll never admit it to ourselves, but we all know the difference between real people and “internet people,” and it is that perception that makes it okay to learn details about the lives of total strangers. After all, they put it there for us to see.
Right now Shayne and I have a special relationship that is unique to our generation: We control each other’s existence. We have a weird non-relationship that works for us. Occasionally we’ll respond to each other’s comments around a mutual friend, but for the most part, one of us could be a robot for all the other one knows. Just like all the girls in high school who refused to sleep with me because they didn’t want to “lose our friendship,” I don’t want to meet Shayne Lancaster in real life because it will change our non-existent relationship forever. We’ll break the unspoken agreement between us, and my brain will have to accept him as an actual person. As a result of being able to see the links between me and everyone on the planet, I’ve become more open publicly, but more closed-off privately. This is the Shayne Lancaster Effect.
So Shayne, I’m sure you’re a great guy and all, but I don’t want things to change between us. Sorry.
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