Facebook’s theatre of sophistication

It was one of those easy evenings: my friend and I sprawled on the bed, gossiping in that unhurried way only comfort allows. A plate of forbidden carbs -- puffy hot daalpuri -- sat between us, her frothy instant coffee churned by a battery whisk, my plain tea steaming quietly.

Between laughter and crumbs, the talk turned to Facebook. We agreed it has become a stage for sophistication, a theatre of fictional reality where rain‑soaked coffee cups, designer outfits, choreographed selfies, and borrowed lines from Márquez or Arundhuti Roy serve as props. Likes and comments are applause. I’ve seen poor boyfriends toil through a hundred takes to capture the perfect pout, never quite satisfying their girlfriends.

We, with our strong personalities and playful streak of meanness, concluded that sophistication online is performance, not reality. So I decided to play along with Dhaka’s Facebook crowd, staging a shoot with my friend -- no connoisseur of high fashion, trust me, she wears her trademark Bata flip‑flops on the Alps. She has opinions on everything, from basil in salads to seating arrangements at decorated tables, and she is a Facebook fighter, a genre of activism that deserves its own story.

I, meanwhile, am an avid follower of fashion journalism, needing the latest Vogue edition with Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep. As our conversation reached a crescendo, bemused by the superficiality of it all, I insisted she sit for a spur‑of‑the‑moment shoot. It became a layered vignette: her cynical take on Facebook’s show‑off culture against my framing of it as her “Frida Kahlo, Márquez, or Arundhuti Roy moment,” rain tapping the window, frothy coffee in hand, ghosts of icons hovering in the margins.

For a fleeting second, she belonged to that glossy world she neither knew nor cared for. Yet reality tugged at the edges -- she is, after all, a flip‑flop devotee of action‑romance thrillers, more at home in car chases and cinematic embraces than couture salons. The irony amused me: in my world, Anna Wintour and she make perfect sense as symbols of the superficiality we promote online, while in reality our bare feet tucked under pillows and daalpuri grease on our fingers told the truer story.

Outside the feed, life is lived with ease and humour, not hashtags or filters. But on Facebook, sophistication has become the perfectly staged selfie, the curated projection of intellect and taste. Visibility and validation -- likes, comments, shares -- become social currency. The more glamorous the post, the more admiration it attracts, and this cycle of exaggeration slips into narcissism.

Narcissism here is not just vanity -- it is structural. Seeing others perform sophistication pushes us to elevate our own image, creating a loop of competition and performance. Facebook has become less a space for connection and more a mirror that magnifies narcissism. Offline, culture is comfort and humour; online, it is spectacle stitched together for validation. The contrast is stark: one is a show designed for admiration, the other the rhythm of survival and authenticity.