Rob Fleming, the hero of Nick Hornby’s pleasurable novel High Fidelity, approaches life as something to be ranked. He doesn’t just have to hand the usual lists men of a certain obsessive temperament make–top five films, top five songs. When his live-in girlfriend Laura leaves him, practically his first step is to catalog his “desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups.”
Rob might be trying to learn from his mistakes, but this list-making habit seems like a symptom of arrested development. If he hadn’t been so devoted to the hobby of pigeonholing everything he experiences, he might not have lost Laura in the first place.
We’re all self-absorbed Rob Flemings now. At least those of us on Facebook. The most popular application on that social networking site is LivingSocial, an add-on that lets its 24.5 million monthly active users share opinions on books, music, anything. The app grew exponentially when it introduced the “Pick Your Five” feature this spring, just as a Facebook redesign put the answers to such quizzes front and center. Nine million top five (or any five) lists were created the first week.
Subjects in which you can “Pick Your Five” range from the traditional party-game–Five Dead People You Would Invite to Dinner–to modern fun best had alone with a hard drink in hand: Top Five People I Want To Punch In The Face. (Osama bin Laden and Kanye West are fashionable picks there; I fear keeping company with the world’s most notorious terrorist will only inflate troubled Kanye’s ego more.)
Recently, the most popular top five was Favorite Songs Ever, followed by Five Favorite Pokémon. (That latter’s surprising–it’s obviously a fool’s errand, with Pikachu clearly the best, and no others even memorable.) I’d like to think my friends (or “friends,” as we say on Facebook) have a little more imagination. The quiz they’ve taken most is Five Things I Don’t Leave the House Without. (I plan to stay on the good side of the guy who always carries a Swiss Army knife.)
You can even create your own categories. That’s how I discovered how pernicious is this app that lets you get to know your “friends” better. Favorite Songs Ever wasn’t interesting enough for me. So I created a Five Perfect Songs category. “Perfect” is, after all, a word that carries with it some idea of specific standards. But the difficulties inherent in crafting the perfect list were thus magnified–I had to create a perfect list of the perfect.
Rob Fleming made it look so easy. It’s actually pretty hard to choose just five out of the, in this case, few million songs ever written. Talk about a fool’s errand. I had to take my admiration of many genres of music, and boil it down into something digestible for Facebook’s newsfeed. I limited myself to rock, and my first choice was easy: Blur’s “Beetlebum” might not be their most riotous song (that’s “Song 2”) or most affecting (that’s “Coffee & TV”). But it was surely a perfect song. So is the Stone Roses’ “Love Spreads.” Or do I just think so because it would also be on my favorite song list?
It got harder after that. The Beatles, after all, have written a lot of great songs. Shouldn’t this most influential of bands feature on any list of songs? But most of their stuff has too much of a rough edge, attractive as it is, to be considered perfect. What exactly did I mean by “perfect,” anyway? What started as a five-song, five-minute diversion turned into something more than five times longer. I suppose I had better get used to it. Brevity is no longer the soul of wit, or of lingerie–it’s the only way to bare your soul. Long magazine pieces gave way to short ones, magazines gave way to blogs, blogs gave way to Facebook status updates, and now Facebook is giving way to Twitter’s 140-character limit.
Nobody wants to have long conversations anymore: Say what you have to say–quickly–and then give somebody else a turn. That’s the new democracy.
At least we’re still interacting. In fact, “Pick Your Five” provides a means of communication in an age in which actual communication seems so recherché. Who picks up a phone, unless it’s to send a text message? Telling people the Five Things I Could Grab From Where I’m Sitting: No cheating! says rather a lot about you–which is why you’ll spend far too much time deciding which five things to mention. (I think I’d leave out my nail file; it could imply I’m vain or neurotic.)
Despite how painful these quizzes are to complete–would Doctor Johnson scare everyone else from my dinner table?–I’m glad these time-wasters exist. They’ll eventually be the only way to learn about potential friends and mates. In the digital age, you can’t examine someone’s record collection: It’s on their iPod. Soon, you won’t peruse their bookshelves, either: Amazon’s Kindle is making those obsolete. And what better way is there to sum up a person?
Rob Fleming succinctly tells us everything we need to know about one of his top five breakups: “Penny was nice-looking and her top five recording artists were Carly Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and Elton John.”
I had better start refining my enthusiasms.
Kelly Jane Torrance writes about culture for the Washington Times.
