The Facebook Sonnet

As the title states, the poem is a sonnet, and it follows many of the conventions of the English or Shakespearean sonnet form, although each line is shorter than in the traditional form. It is clear that the speaker does not care for Facebook, or at least for the way people use it. The poet may have a certain demographic in mind, since the first two lines relay how people use Facebook to reunite online with old friends from high school, as well as with past lovers, even if their relationship did not end well. The likely demographic Alexie’s speaker is addressing in his mocking, ironic tone is therefore neither teenagers nor people in their twenties nor even thirties, but people entering middle age; the poet himself was in his mid-forties when he wrote the poem, so it is possible he had his own generation in mind.

The speaker takes a negative view of how such people interact on Facebook. It is as if they are using it as a virtual playground where they attempt recreating an earlier stage in their lives. This is likely (although not directly stated in the poem) because they experience the present as unrewarding, or difficult, or otherwise troublesome. They “undervalue and unmend / The present” (Lines 4-5) in favor of the gentle nostalgia that comes with thinking back to “childhood” (Line 4). The expression “Unmend / The present” (Lines 4-5) likely means that, in the speaker’s eyes, these middle-aged denizens of Facebook are neglecting their lives in the present. They refuse to work on their lives or try to improve them; in other words, they are unwilling to tackle all issues that are actually present in their lives. Such people neglect that they are now in another stage of life that demands something different: “Why can’t we pretend” (Line 5), the speaker asks ironically, adopting the stance of those he criticizes, “Every stage of life is the same?” (Line 6).

Getting pleasantly lost in the pages of Facebook is thus seen by the speaker as a form of regression, an immature desire to not grow up. Facebook offers such people a kind of endless childhood that can be dug up from the past and adopted and continued in the present: “Let’s exhume, resume, and extend / Childhood” (Lines 7-8), the speaker states, barely masking his contempt behind the irony of his agreeable tone. Let us treat life as the game that we used to regard it as, when we were children, he says. Nothing needs to be taken seriously.

Moreover, in Lines 9 and 10, the speaker picks up many people’s tendency to disclose on social media every detail of their lives, however personal. Sometimes this results in a kind of fame in the digital world (when someone’s written post, image, or video “goes viral,” that is, it is rapidly shared by a large number of people).

The speaker may be suggesting that these Facebook users care little about the reason for their online “fame”; it does not matter to them if some might consider it shameful to offer such personal revelations and confessions: “Let fame / And shame intertwine” (Lines 9-10). Another possible interpretation of this invocation of “shame” is that the speaker is implying that Facebook enthusiasts do not sufficiently care about how some users may be shamed—heavily criticized or deliberately humiliated by a large number of other posters—on the social media site.

What seems to matter most to Facebook enthusiasts, in the speaker’s view, is that their news, opinions, and information are shared—launched into the online world for any other user to see. (The poet treats the issue with a broad brush, not mentioning the fact that, at the time the poem was published in 2011, Facebook had privacy settings that gave users a certain control over their audience and other personal data. Such privacy policies were, however, criticized at the time for being inadequate and difficult to understand.)

In Lines 10-12, the speaker extends his critique. He feels that social media has replaced religious institutions as a vehicle for faith, spirituality, and worship. What formerly took place in churches has shifted online as just another detail of life to be shared, to be put in the “public domain” (Line 11) because people now believe that doing so is somehow valuable. The speaker ironically suggests that a website be set up called “church.com” (Line 12)—or perhaps he is referring ironically to Facebook—indicating that Facebook is already a kind of secular church for its vast congregation of users.

The concluding couplet, as is common in a Shakespearean sonnet, offers an epigrammatic twist on the point of view that has so far been expressed ironically. The speaker drops the irony and reveals his view directly: Facebook (and, implicitly, social media generally), does not truly foster personal connections that genuinely nourish people’s lives. Instead, it is a place where lonely people gather. Loneliness is its signature. Facebook is no more than an “altar of loneliness” (Line 14)—hardly the kind of church that anyone would want to join. He may mean that lonely people are drawn to social media as a way of making connections, or that frequent use of social media actually makes people lonely, even if they were not before.