I HAVE a feeling that if Andy Warhol were alive he would be spending the summer writing a novel that takes place in real time on Facebook. In that spirit, Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser have been writing a clever serialized novel on Slate called “My Darklyng.” Their innovation: the plot unfolds not just in text but on Facebook and Twitter.
For the purposes of what they affectionately call their “gonzo art project,” the veteran young-adult novelists Ms. Mechling and Ms. Moser created a fake Facebook page for their main character, 16-year-old Natalie Pollock. What’s fascinating is that Natalie’s page may seem fake and stilted and artificial, but only in the way all teenagers’ Facebook pages seem fake and stilted and artificial.
Which is to say “My Darklyng” offers a brilliant commentary on how fictional teenagers are on Facebook. Their stylized, mannered projections of self are as invented as any in a novel. There are regional differences, of course, to the mannerisms but there are certain common tics: Okayyyyyyyyy. Ahhhhhhh. Everything is extreme: So-and-so “is obsessed with.” So-and-so “just had the longest day EVERRRRRR.” They are in a perpetual high pitch of pleasure or a high pitch of crisis or sometimes just a high pitch of high pitch. Holden Caulfield might have called it “phoniness.”
A 14-year-old I talked to about this sent me a message that pretty much sums it up: “I write more enthusiastically on Facebook than I actually am in real life. Like if I see something remotely funny I might say ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA,’ when really there is no expression on my face.”
Another girl tells me she spends one, or maybe three, or maybe six hours a day on Facebook. She gets updates and messages to her phone during the school day, when she is not on summer vacation, hanging out on Facebook the way some people in a quaint and distant era might have hung out at a pool. It would be hard to say exactly how much time we are talking about, but suffice it to say: it’s a lot of time.
In the dark, medieval days before the Internet, teenagers were forced to scribble their stagiest experiments in self-hood in journals and notebooks, or to express themselves through their clothes. The high drama was the same, the amped-up, overstated processing of life the same, but the media available were inferior. How amazing to be able to tell your 1,344 closest friends, “guess who I saw at the Apple store? I died it was so awkward!!!!!!!” Or “ I am so freaked out and excited about tomorrow I can’t stop eating, are you experiencing this?” or “Robert in twilight is so ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Facebook gives the exhibitionism, the pure theater of those years, a whole other level of stage.
In “My Darklyng’s” intriguing meta-commentary, there is a certain cross-pollination of what might be considered real life and fiction. Ms. Mechling and Ms. Moser hired a 15-year-old, Hannah Grosman, to be featured in photographs and videos for the character Natalie’s Facebook page. There are real people commenting on Natalie’s page; Hannah uses one of the photos from a photo shoot of herself as Natalie with another actress as the profile picture on her real Facebook page. A video of a kiss at the World Cup was posted on Natalie’s page just minutes before one of Hannah’s real friends posted the same thing. So it is no longer art imitating life, or life imitating art, but the two merging so completely, so inexorably that it would be impossible to disentangle one from the other, rather elegantly making the point that these media, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, all this doodling in the ether, involve wholesale inventions of self, not projections.
One predominant fictional argot of Facebook for teenagers would be breathlessness or emphatic speech. Their pages are peppered with “Okkkkayyyyy” and” HAHAHAHA. “ and “OMG!!!!!” You can find polite little girls cursing like sailors on Facebook. Everything is louder, more ardent, capitalized. This is a way of dramatizing or raising the stakes on even the most inane or banal exchange: You don’t just look cute. You look soooooooooooooo cute!!!!!!! For every piece of idle communication it is as if you are stranded on a desert island, waving your arms and jumping up and down to get the attention of a passing plane.
One of the other great adolescent poses of Facebook is irony at all times. So if you say, “can’t wait for the Lady Gaga concert,” you might add “lol” or you might say “Hey you are at camp and I’m in England, but I just wanted to let you know that I miss youuuu hahaha” to make it clear that you are not really looking forward to anything or expressing an actual emotion in a way that might be overly earnest or embarrassing.
Many, especially slightly older teenagers, seem to like to parody the Facebook norms even as they embrace them. The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write “omg” you are ironically commenting on the use of “omg,” but when other people write “omg” they are seriously saying “oh my God.” This very delicate balancing act is artful, in its way. Your character is now employing the clichés of the genre, but with satire, or maybe that would be satirrrrrrrrrre.
It is, in short, a brilliant stroke to use Facebook for novel writing, because in general Facebook feeds on fiction; it consumes it, and spits it out in every direction.
Being “friends” on Facebook is more of a fantasy or imitation or shadow of friendship than the traditional real thing. Friendship on Facebook bears about the same relation to friendship in life, as being run over by a car in a cartoon resembles being run over by a car in life. Facebook is friendship minus the one on one conversation, minus the moment alone at a party in a corner with someone (note to ninth graders: chat and messages don’t count); Facebook is the chatter of a big party, the performance of public cleverness, the facades and fronts and personas carefully crafted, the one honed line, the esprit de l’escalier; in short, the edited version. Do you know anything at all about your Facebook friends? Do you, in spite of the “missssssssss you girlieeeee!!!!!” and the “I cantttttt believe you are going awayyyyyyyyyy,” care about all of them?
It should be said that adults are not necessarily less fictionalized, or more themselves, on Facebook; they are simply less natural, less conversant, less in their element, when they fictionalize. How many people do you know who are in the midst of some great existential or marital crisis, but whose Facebook page is all family photos from the south of France, or the Vineyard, or Bangkok, and charming things their children said?
Somewhere in the gap between status posting and the person in their room at night is life itself. So fiction is the right response, the right commentary, the right point to be making about who we are in these dangerously consuming media, in these easy addictive nano-connections.
It is not, alas, “The Sun Also Rises,” but Facebook is the novel we are all writing.



Katie Roiphe teaches at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her last book is “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages.”