George Orwell was wrong when he predicted that it would take political pressure to impoverish our language; technology has done it faster than politics ever could. Social interaction is reduced lately to a click of the “Like” button. Opinions have been cut to 140 characters, enough to tell everyone how you hate traffic jams, or to quote some other famous writer that has found better ways to express your own thoughts. Meanwhile, these social placebos reduce the need for physical proximity: a green icon is enough to make you believe that there are another 20, 30 or 100 people with the same icon keeping you company. It’s easy to criticize this lack of materiality, or we could just recognize that we’ve entered a new reality. Immersed in virtuality, we finally live in a Platonized world of ideas. Watching your girl through a web cam is real enough for modern souls. Spying pics on Facebook makes you a real stalker. Chatting with strangers a real player.

Postmodernism, John Gray once wrote, is simply the latest fad in anthropocentrism. Gray (the LSE philosopher, not the Men are from Mars guy) is sympathetic to the Gaia hypothesis, but you do not have to agree with that hypothesis (or with much else in Gray’s eclectic thought) in order to reject the idea, associated with some postmodern thinkers (perhaps, pre-eminently, Richard Rorty), that the world exists only insofar as it figures in our preferred descriptions. The last decade or so should have done a lot to diminish the appeal of the idea that truth and reality are simply artifacts of human ideology: after all, as The Daily Show and Colbert make all too clear, it is Fox and friends who now live this idea, and it is up to Jon and crew to defend reality-based policy, and up to Stephen to lampoon “truthiness.” The Right-wing’s reality-denial on the environment, on the economy, and on foreign policy (the list goes on and on) has brought home the suffocating horror of Rortian postmodernism: meanwhile the truth (even if inconvenient) of climate change has demonstrated (for those who had doubts) that there is, indeed, a world beyond the nets of language.

In the first round of obituaries, Whitney Houston is remembered equally as a show-stopping vocalist—arguably the best of our time—and as a drug-addled, domestic abuse victim. So, who will win for the history books? The peppy Whitney of her music videos or the messy Whitney of talk shows? This is not a question we would be able to ask of Amy Winehouse or other contemporary pop stars. What makes Whitney different from Winehouse is that her music barely reveals her hard-worn life off the stage. Amy Winehouse sang of “Rehab”; the chorus of Rihanna’s first single, after Chris Brown was indicted on domestic abuse charges, was “We found love in a hopeless place.” These are women whose life stories and discographies are interchangeable. Their stars rose at a time when privacy, as a concept, was falling. By contrast Whitney’s songs, even her dance tracks, are always wistful—see “How Do I Know When He Really Loves Me?” or “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)”—but the emotion is so scaled-back that the lyrics seem to describe the state of a middle school girl without a date to the dance. (The fact that she sang these songs wearing a big bow in her hair only re-enforced our sense of her innocence.) Even when we knew all her secrets, she still refused to own up to them in her lyrics, as in her exceptionally elusive single “It’s Not Right, But It’s Ok.” Celebrities today are generally pitied for their overexposure. But, perhaps, overexposure relaxes certain rules of comportment; maybe living out in the open is easier than maintaining dual identities. There’s no point to playing perfect when everyone read your drunken series of Tweets last night. Whitney, on the other hand, had a persona to maintain; she kept up the feminine restraint. This is why her music didn’t have much appeal in the Tell-All Century. But it also means that, some years from now, a young girl will hear one of her sweet songs on the radio and not even bother to Google the singer. And that’s exactly how Whitney would want it.

Abortion is back in the headlines, with commentators (as usual) ignoring the real problem. Imagine that having a child was cheap, safe and only took a week. No abortions, right? But having a child is incredibly expensive, dangerous, and harmful to the mother’s career. These difficulties can be mitigated by universal, free health care and mandated p/maternity leave. But anti-abortion conservatives (unlike liberal Catholics) oppose the very governmental “interference,” which, by making childbearing as attractive, enjoyable and rewarding as it could be, would best reduce the number of abortions. Eight hour work days, four weeks of holiday leave each year, nine months of maternity leave, six months of paternity leave, low-cost child care and adequate, free health care for mothers? Less abortion, right? Perhaps if we spent our time building a social democracy, instead of fighting about our rights—to religion or personal choice, depending on your point of view—abortion could just be the sad necessity it often is.

You don’t have to agree with Ron Paul to find him appealing—you only have to dislike politics. Politics has always been a popularity contest or a power struggle or both, and with this season’s Republican debates we’ve seen those two evolve and combine into a higher form: reality TV. The game is a simple one. Take eight applause-seekers and put them through various trials to see who can resist a small helping of immediate applause now in favor of a larger windfall later. The host asks whether the candidate would ever accept any tax rises; the candidate knows not to say things that will hurt him in November, but he pleads with himself and wins. This one teeny little time couldn’t hurt, could it? Not now that all those hands are poised to clap? And there it is—boom. Gingrich says we should kill our enemies and is cheered; Paul says we should apply the Golden Rule and is booed. Yet Paul seems not to care. Is he even trying to win? Have the rules been explained to him? Or is he playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers? Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but I can’t help hoping that he is.

So I’m trying out this new Timeline thing on Facebook, culling through eight years of weird, embarrassing or just plain forgettable social media history. According to the promo video, I have just seven days before it goes live to find a way to present myself to the world as the protagonist in some compelling, coming-of-age collage. But I’m struggling with the assignment. There are reasons I’m a fiction writer and not a memoirist, though I was told again and again in grad school that fiction is dying, its thin voice no longer audible above the noisy reality narrative. It took me until now to realize that Facebook probably never was the right place for those of us who don’t feel comfortable with our lives having an angle, or being boiled down to a few characterizing images. During the next few weeks, in any event, we will have to make a choice: 1) Give up and deactivate, 2) stay and submit to the form’s limitations or 3) do what I will be doing, which is pruning my Timeline into the best damn meta-fictional magical realism ever to be seen in the history of social networking.