The Facebook Sonnet

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Call to Action and Group Consciousness

The word “Let’s” (Lines 4, 7, 8, 13), a contraction of “let us,” occurs four times in the poem. In the one quatrain where it does not occur (the third), the word “let” appears three times, in the sense of allowing something to happen once one has taken the initial step. Grammatically, “Let us” is a first-person plural imperative, which is often used to make suggestions that include the speaker. The use of “Let’s” shows that the speaker is appealing for group action. He himself speaks, ironically, as if he is part of that group, encouraging people to take the plunge and sign up for Facebook (or perhaps another social media site like Twitter).

The people he addresses—likely anyone of a certain age with an internet connection—must become part of the new trend, he implies. It is the time to do it; everyone is doing it. The reader can likely picture the speaker’s arm waving them forward like a general urging his men on (the irony of the speaker’s tone notwithstanding). The emphasis is on the collective. Everything depends on everyone participating. It is the group that counts, rather than individuals. In other words, people join together to create a certain online culture, and, in doing so, they lose their individual powers of discrimination; they get pulled into whatever activity the group seems to enjoy, even if it is like an “endless high-school / Reunion” (Lines 1-2). In that sense, “Let’s” is a call for a kind of herd mentality in which people unconsciously conform to the values of the group.

The Triviality of Online Interaction

A recurring motif is the triviality and immaturity of Facebook activity. There is nothing meaningful going on, merely a retreading of a stage of life that the speaker thinks people should have outgrown long ago (assuming he is taking aim at a middle-aged demographic). It is as if people are trapped by the novelty of the platform, since Facebook was a relatively new invention when the poem was written in 2011. Things that might be tedious or unappealing in a real-life context become engrossing online for some reason that the speaker does not explain, unless it is by positing a kind of collective regression that Facebook seems to induce. Playing “The games / That occupy the young” (Lines 8-9) seems to sum it up for him.

Alexie himself threw a little light on the speaker’s obvious frustration and bafflement at the popularity of social media in a 2013 interview with Bill Moyers, “Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Cultural Borders.” He commented that, in the internet era,

there are no secrets anymore. You’re supposed to now Twitter everything you’re feeling, you know? You go to, you know, some artists’, writers’ Twitters. And like everybody else, they’re talking about what they had for dinner, you know? All over writers’ Twitter feeds and Facebook pages are pictures of what they had for dinner. And why anybody would care, you know, that I had a bowl of cereal in my hotel room this morning, I don’t get it (“Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Cultural Borders“. 2013. Billmoyers.com).

Thus, on Facebook, the trivial becomes the accepted currency.

Pretense and Inauthenticity

The speaker’s ironic critique suggests throughout that Facebook offers only a make-believe world, a “let’s pretend” fantasy ungrounded in the full human experience. Given that, it is not surprising that the experience results in disappointment and “loneliness” (Line 14). Underlying this critique is the notion of one-dimensionality and a lack of concrete sense experience on which the human experience is based. Alexie commented on this in his interview with Moyers.

The human is so complex […] And as we’re relating here, we’re relating on so many different levels that we don’t consciously understand. I mean, we’re actually smelling each other right now, but our, we, as we talk, don’t know that, but our bodies know that, you know? My gestures, your gestures, the look in your eye. And the internet takes all that away. There was, there is one level of communication on the internet, which actually in a way is really insulting to the complexity of being human (Ibid).

After a question and a prompt from Moyers, Alexie continued:

One dimension. And that’s not who we are. The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific […] It’s the worst sort of précis of who we are […] [which] can’t be replicated in any form whatsoever with the internet. And when people say they’re really connecting with somebody, I think, it occurs to me that I don’t know that they’ve ever really connected with anybody if they think the internet is how you do it (Ibid).