You are not your bookcase

Online profiles and painfully constructed "faves lists" have turned us into a bunch of unwitting snobs. Enough already.

By Megan Hustad

Read more: Books, social networking, Life, facebook

Christopher Walsh/Salon

May 2, 2008 | A few weeks ago, a friend who grew up in Communist Eastern Europe told me he thought the "product endorsements" on social networking sites like Facebook -- those lists of each member's favorite books, bands and movies -- were paid for. You provide a plug for someone's book alongside your vital statistics? Surely you get paid, he reasoned -- this is America! He found this practice to be wonderfully efficient: In his eyes, companies had figured out a way to cut out the high-priced firms and just let people advertise to one another. It was, he thought, absolutely brilliant.

I gently explained that these plugs were entirely voluntary. But why do we spend so much time crafting such elaborate summaries of our buying habits? It gets us dates, for one. If a girl posts a halfway-decent photo and expresses a taste for George Saunders, "Lolita" and the Clash, she is guaranteed an e-mail asking her to elaborate over drinks next week. (I speak from experience.) But the prospect of trolling for dates doesn't explain the zeal with which people throw themselves into perfecting these lists, as anyone who's received an e-mail notification informing them that a faraway friend has just removed "The Flight of the Conchords" from her list of favorite TV shows can attest. We don't shill for profit; we post these lists to give people a sense of who we are. We plot points on a graph and hope it -- we -- will be interpreted correctly.

Using consumption habits as a sort of self-expression shorthand has become so ubiquitous that we don't even blink. Hi, I'm Megan, I'm from New York, and I like the Jam, Prince, Nina Simone, mid-1990s D.C. punk, "The Colbert Report," "Little House on the Prairie," Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth," "Middlemarch," "The Moviegoer," Kazuo Ishiguro, Joan Didion's essay "On Self-Respect" and Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

Too much, too soon, you say? Lately I've been thinking it's a bit too much -- period. The "I like this = I'm like this" cultural moment, as Virginia Postrel succinctly put it in "The Substance of Style," has turned us into self-handicapping snobs: Since we've taken so much care to craft our own perfect list, we feel more entitled to shrug off anyone whose list doesn't similarly impress. Would you be interested in someone who identifies with "The Secret"? We're also keeping our distance from a whole array of cultural output because we think it sends the wrong message about who we are and what we want to be.

I'll stick with books, because I care most about them. In my pretentious literary circles, the reluctance to pick up anything beyond the aesthetic boundaries of our faves lists -- which run roughly from Dostoevski to Geoff Dyer -- is especially pernicious when it comes to the self-improvement genre. No one wants to be seen in this section of the bookstore. If you even mention the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" to these people -- as I have numerous times in the last year -- it's possible to make someone visibly flinch; it's as if the person you're talking to never expected to be at the same party with someone who read such books. I have friends who've endured numerous romantic humiliations who wouldn't, on pain of death, read relationship advice. When I worked in book publishing, I never thought of reading a tome of business advice, even during moments when the rising fumes of fetid office politics brought tears to my eyes. I was above that. I was hoping the right workplace strategy would reveal itself through a particularly nuanced reading of Gogol's "Dead Souls."

Of course one could say that the pretentious and literary like their dysfunction, and so their reluctance to pick up anything that's not them, even if it might help, shouldn't worry anyone. (And you could also say that most self-help or career advice books are too facile to be of help. More on that later.) But there's also the possibility that over-identification with our preferred products weakens our political instincts.

A few years ago I attended a panel discussion at a local college organized in part to let people blow off steam in the wake of the 2002 elections. I don't remember the exact topic, but I do remember that Janeane Garofalo was there, as well as famous flat-tax crusader Grover Norquist. Whenever Norquist started speaking, hisses would emanate from the crowd, and eventually, decorum gave way and scattered hisses devolved into outright booing. But the booers were abruptly shushed by a noted leftie on the panel -- not Garofalo -- who interjected that maybe folks ought to be quiet. Maybe just listen for a second. Norquist's political acumen, the noted leftie said, was about as keen as Lenin's, and if we really wanted to put our high-minded ideals into effect, perhaps we ought to be less precious about what ideas we allowed ourselves to hear.

And perhaps reading Norquist's "Leave Us Alone" could help someone organize a push for federally subsidized childcare. But the notion that what we're reading says something about us continually trips us up. Recently my conservative father suggested I pick up "You Are the Message" by Roger Ailes. Ailes is the president of the Fox News Channel and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. I made a face and started to protest that the prospect was noxious to me. My father replied that sound advice was sound advice and perhaps I shouldn't worry so much about the source.

Was he really suggesting that the pointers in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" would be worth following if, say, Robert Mugabe had authored it? Not quite. He was saying that if I'd decided a book had nothing to offer me before I'd read a single word, then perhaps I wasn't as cosmopolitan as I liked to imagine I was. Then he started boasting about how back in the mid-'70s, he forced his white suburban Minnesota high school students to read the Black Panthers' Ten-Point Program, too.

This conversation helped to dislodge some of my reluctance to pick up a book that was not "me." I didn't buy Ailes' book, but I did read it -- cover to cover, alone in my bedroom. Because while I was emotionally and intellectually ready to receive whatever wisdom Ailes' book offered, I was not prepared to be seen anywhere in public with it.

When I started asking around, I found that quite a few people were consuming "off-message" books, but only in the privacy of their own homes. As a painfully shy and awkward teen, my friend Ben procured a copy of Larry King's "How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere," hoping it would help him get through high school's more trying moments. But he was so embarrassed to have this book -- he even worried what his parents might think -- that he kept it hidden under his bed as if it were "Barely Legal."

Next page: I bought a paperback of "Transforming Problems Into Happiness" and stashed it behind the collected works of Philip Roth