Hunter: When profile becomes person

This summer, at a coffee farm in Nicaragua without electricity or running water, I wound up… This summer, at a coffee farm in Nicaragua without electricity or running water, I wound up witnessing an accidental social experiment. Though my primary comfort concern had been remaining calm in a spider-infested outhouse the size of a refrigerator, what ended up being more difficult to deal with was the blanketing darkness.

The sun sets around 5 p.m. there, hours before our group of 10 undergraduates and two graduate instructors was able to fall asleep. We didn’t have a campfire and were not willing to drain our flashlight batteries for the sake of shadow puppets. So we were left in the dark with nothing to entertain ourselves but that most archaic of all communication forms — face-to-face conversation.

This scene had all the elements of my most nostalgic bonding moments at Girl Scout camp, but something was different this time. The darkness, the erasure of faces, made it feel a little as if no one else was there — just a collection of floating voices.

Instead of telling stories, we threw out random quips that dissolved into nothing, creating a conversational black hole. At the time, I didn’t think of this as peculiar — we were tired and didn’t know each other really well, so we did what we could to be friendly and avoid awkwardness.

Then, back in Pittsburgh a month later, the 29- and 34-year-old graduate students who were present that night commented to me that they had been baffled by the conversation, or lack thereof. It wasn’t the topics that were unfamiliar to them, but rather the way in which we were talking. One of them described it as “15 different CD players playing pop culture sound bites.”

I realized at that moment that I had witnessed social media surreptitiously replicating itself in real life. We, the world’s young Internet addicts, responded to social awkwardness by falling back on the tactics of the medium with which we were most comfortable: Facebook. A place where we spurt out disconnected snippets to nobody and everybody at the same time, where we do whatever we can to seem cool or funny, because you never know who is listening or watching, only that somebody is.

Online, we have become more performers than partakers in a conversation, whether we’re being nosy voyeurs or narcissistic actors. We become mini-versions of the celebrities we obsess over on blogs and E! and VH1 — at least in our heads. And now these tendencies are spilling over into our real lives.

But what happens when we start performing so much that we stop listening? What happens when we become a copies of the copies of ourselves we create online, and those copies happen to be incredibly self-absorbed?

Google the phrase “generation of entitlement,” and you’ll find that our elders have already been discussing this occurrence in a variety of forums, from teaching blogs to sociology journals. In her book “Generation Me,” Dr. Jean Twenge chronicles the simultaneous proliferation of self-esteem and depression in young people who, after repeating the mantra “I am unique” all throughout their childhood, hit adulthood to find out that, well, what do you know, they’re not all that unique.

Perhaps Facebook is just one way of dealing with this reality — in a modern world ever more connected, competitive, public and entrenched in the celebrity, we feel tinier every day — increasingly aware that each one of us embodies less than one six-billionth of the creative energy on this planet.

So we perform online to create something that is only ours, without realizing that we’re just further complicating things. With Facebook, private and public lives have been fused, and somewhere along the line the self has been muddied, if not lost altogether.

We’re not alone in this.

It seems that no one is immune.This phenomenon has been encapsulated in real life once again in the oh-so-Facebook-esque flurry of controversy surrounding “The Social Network,” the recently released movie about the creation of Facebook.

In the mainstream media’s unshakable eye, Facebook’s ironically private creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has criticized the film’s storyline — which hints that he might have stolen the idea for the website — for being overly dramatized and fictional. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook executives tried to make behind-the-scenes changes to the script to portray Zuckerberg’s character more positively.

Then, in what New York magazine referred to as “the PR move of the month,” Zuckerberg announced on Oprah last week that he’ll donate $100 million to schools in Newark, N.J. — an impressive philanthropic move that comes at a very opportune moment.

After all, we all know Facebook is only about profile image.