20 pages • 40 minutes read
The Facebook Sonnet
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Background
Historical Context: Facebook, Addiction, and Loneliness
Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and three other Harvard University students. It had therefore been in existence for only seven years when Alexie wrote “The Facebook Sonnet.” By the end of 2004, the social networking service had one million users, a number that continued to grow rapidly as the decade wore on. By 2008, Facebook had overtaken Myspace as the most popular social media website in number of visits.
Although Facebook was free to join (and still is), the company profited from its advertisers, so it tried to keep people logged on for as long as possible and encourage them to come back quickly after they logged off. Facebook accomplished this by allowing users to accumulate feedback on their posts, photos, or comments in the form of notifications and “likes,” so they could see who was reacting to their posts and what they were saying. People liked the instant gratification this provided, and the use of Facebook soon developed an addictive quality. It is human nature to want acknowledgement and praise, so users would keep returning to the site to see how many likes a particular post had accumulated and whether anyone was commenting on it. The more a person participated, the more feedback they got, which led to even more participation. It became a habit that was hard to break.
However, as use of Facebook and other social media exploded during the 2010s, the question arose of the effects on people who spent many hours a day on social media: Would it somehow make them happier because they were able to connect instantly to so many people, or would some other effect be noticed? Notably, bearing in mind the main theme of “The Facebook Sonnet,” a number of surveys and studies suggest a link between social media use and feelings of loneliness. A 2017 study, “Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S.,” was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The researchers investigated a link between perceived social isolation and social media use among young Americans aged 19-32. Social media use was assessed in terms of use of 11 social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine, Snapchat, and Reddit. Results showed that those with high social media use felt more socially isolated than those with a lower level of social media use. Indeed, those whose social media use was highest had more than twice the odds of reporting social isolation than those whose use was lowest. This study does not confirm causation—that is, it is unclear whether social media use causes loneliness, or whether people who are already lonely seek out the online connections of social media. However, the correlation is clear.
Another study is more suggestive of causation. “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression,” published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2018, is authored by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who studied the social media use of 143 undergraduates. One group agreed to limit their use of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to a total of 30 minutes a day, while the control group continued as usual. The study found that, compared to the control group, those who reduced their social media use showed a significant reduction in loneliness and depression.
Literary Context
The sonnet form was developed in Italy in the 14th century by the poet Petrarch. The sonnet reached England in the 16th century. Since then, these two forms of the sonnet have flourished and are known as the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the English or Shakespearean sonnet. Many of the great English poets, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, D. G. Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as American poets such as Longfellow and E. A. Robinson, have contributed to the form. In the early and mid-20th century, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas wrote notable sonnets.
Later in the century, a number of poets experimented by varying the form. In “The Sonnet-Ballad” (1949), Gwendolyn Brooks blended, as the title suggests, the forms of sonnet and ballad. American poet Ted Berrigan (1934-83), in Sonnets (1964), wrote sonnets that had the conventional 14 lines but dispensed with regular rhyme and meter. In Sonnets (1989), another American poet, Bernadette Mayer (b. 1945), also radically re-envisioned the traditional sonnet form, making it much more flexible regarding line length and dispensing with rhyme. Although some of her sonnets maintain the tradition of a turn in the thought beginning in the ninth line (the first line of the sestet), some are recognizable as sonnets only because of the word “sonnet” in the title. Noted American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) also published unrhymed sonnets in the 1960s and 1970s, although he was more traditional in that he usually employed iambic pentameter.
It is against this background that Alexie’s experiments with the sonnet form can be understood. “The Facebook Sonnet” is the most traditional of all his sonnets. The many sonnets that appear in his 2013 collection, What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned, are radical in their innovation. The sonnets are arranged as a single prose paragraph, and there is no rhyme or metrical structure. Each sonnet has 14 numbered lines, but the lines have no standard length; they range from one to four sentences or sentence fragments. Some of this collection’s sonnets include “Sonnet, with Slot Machines,” “Sonnet, with Vengeance,” and “Sonnet, without Stuntmen.”
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By Sherman Alexie
