Neil Serven

Social media was once about sharing what we were doing. As Facebook’s new name reminds us, it’s now about what’s being done to us.

To start with a confession: I miss the is.

If you were on Facebook before 2010, you remember what I mean. When you entered a status on Facebook, it was displayed as a predicate of sorts with your name as the subject and the word is populated in the status box. That is encouraged you to write a status about yourself—an actual third-person status, in a complete sentence, even if that status was “[your name] is bored.”

My first status, entered on the red-letter day I signed up for Facebook in 2008, read, “Neil is about to water-seal two Adirondack chairs.” We had just acquired the chairs from a woodshop in town near where we live. The woodworker recommended that we treat them to ensure their longevity. Facebook asked what I was doing right then, and like a respondent unassumingly filling out a survey, I took the question literally.

Having just bought our house, my wife and I had a lot of new chores and adventures that year, and Facebook gave us a strangely satisfying way to report on our progress. It was a way to show off and keep a register of how we were improving as adults.

Scrolling back to 2008 on my timeline, there are a lot of is statuses, some more monumental than others. They were meant to be Facebook’s version of instant-messenger away messages. The wording of Facebook’s prompt question—”What are you doing right now?”—assumed, even encouraged, that we had something going on in our lives other than Facebook. It took the small activities of our day and enlarged the frame, made them feel important, a contribution to the society at large presented in front of us, in digitized form, on our timelines.

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I thought about this early era of Facebook in light of the company’s recent announcement that its parent company—which also controls Instagram and WhatsApp—would be renamed Meta, with the noun metaverse, coined in 1990s science fiction, to represent experiences of shared virtual reality across all platforms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter announcing the name, cited the word’s etymology—explained as meaning “beyond”—as part of the inspiration behind the choice. “For me,” Zuckerberg said, “[meta] symbolizes that there is always more to build.” Except the story behind meta isn’t that simple. In Greek, meta– means “among, with, or after”; it was its use in New Latin, the language used in scientific nomenclature, that imparted the prefix with a suggestion of transcendence.

Indeed, as a prefix, meta– is about distance and going beyond, inserting an extra hop of thought between you and the base noun. Metaphysics, as described by Aristotle, concerns itself with things that go beyond the realm of the merely physical. Metadata is data about data; say, the title and artist information that populates a digital music file, rather than the song itself. (It’s also expressed in search habits and page visits—precisely what Facebook loves to collect from you.)

But more recent use has seen meta deployed as an adjective for situations that seem to refer to themselves with a kind of ironic detachment—an attitude that’s right in the wheelhouse of Gen Xers. It can describe, for example, an electronic ringtone made to sound like the bell of an old-fashioned telephone, or perhaps Oreos made in the flavor of Cookies N Cream ice cream, traditionally made from crumbled Oreos.  

That this use of meta has exploded in popularity in English lends the word a connotation that sounds like the opposite of what Zuckerberg admires about it. Meta is not about going beyond anymore, or even about participating; it’s about detaching, targeting, and commenting, Greek-chorus style. But that also makes it the perfect name for a platform that users take to and abuse to expand their presences in the virtual world while avoiding the consequences of real life.  

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There was a lot of resistance to the is. People hated it.  There were petitions calling for its abolishment, which eventually happened. This was around the time when Twitter, with its looser interface, began its rise as a rival for our attention. Initially, Facebook got rid of the is but left your name at the front of status prompts, encouraging you to continue writing third-person statuses.

Referring to yourself in the third person is called illeism, from the Latin pronoun ille, meaning “he.” To many, illeism isn’t about self-examination; rather, it’s a signifier of an inflated ego, as well as a removal from personal responsibility—think of Richard Nixon telling reporters they “don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” after losing the 1962 gubernatorial election in California. Celebrities known for illeism—including Bob Dole and the baseball star Rickey Henderson—are typical viewed as impersonable, putting on a corporate front. Your name is your brand; repeating your name in the third person assures that your audience won’t forget who you are.

Eventually Facebook changed its prompt question from “What are you doing right now?” to “What’s on your mind?,” which at the time struck me as insipid. The open-ended question encouraged more liberty in how our statuses were phrased—rantier, chattier, and not pinned to anything happening outside the social media sphere. (Twitter’s casual prompt—“What’s happening?”—still acknowledges a reportage of activity occurring outside the screen.) We could whine, post selfies, share poetry and sunsets—anything to curate an image of ourselves that wasn’t pinned to our real-life activities. We became content creators, famous in Andy Warhol’s vision of the word. By then, Time Magazine had already named You—the second-person pronoun—as its Person of the Year. Dropping the is removed the remaining barrier to the goal of presenting ourselves as whatever product we wanted to be.

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And so now we are meta—meta-individuals existing in a metaverse that we can curate and control when non-virtual life gets too hard. We should have seen it coming. The notion of meta-ness is a natural evolution of a trend made apparent by the explosion of self– concepts that arose in the social media era, from self-care to selfies to glorious self-owns. The name, rather knowingly, doubles down on the detachment that has plagued too much of social media—the idea that Facebook and similar sites exist in a bubble that only mirrors the real world and deadens our ability to engage with it.  For a word that connotes distance and apartness, Meta might be too on the nose.