OUR TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK: in what sense is Facebook a book? The obvious answer might seem to be: in no sense. It’s just the stupid name for what is essentially a glorified e-mailing system with the not especially healthy add-on of allowing people to compete about how many friends they have. But let me just run a small anecdote past you. I – like most of the adult population – am on Facebook. There are other well-known users on Facebook, and one of them messaged me the other day: David Beckham.

“Hi, Dave,” D. B. said, “How’s things with you?” I have met Beckham about three times in real life. He can’t be said to be a close mate. But obviously I was flattered. So I replied “Fine, thanks. What about you? How’s the knee? How’s American soccer?” But then, a slight nagging itch appeared in my head, and I added – seeing that it was 11am in London, therefore about 3am in Los Angeles – “Bit early for you to be up sending messages on Facebook, isn’t it?” Back came the reply: “I’m at the Herts house at the moment. What have you got coming up?” I answered this, but still the itch remained, and so, realising who I was supposedly dealing with, put the words “David Beckham” into Google News, in the hope of finding out where David was meant to be at that very moment. I didn’t find out, but I did find out enough to be able to add to my next post: “Shall I not tell adidas that you’re in the country, seeing as they had to use a hologram of you at their Olympic sponsorship launch today?”

Then, for some hours, radio silence, until finally, the sad truth: OK, I’m not the real D. B.; but I don’t think you’re the real D. B. either.

So this is how Facebook is like a book: a ridiculously deconstructive trying-too-hard-to-be-postmodern-sub-David Mitchell book, but a book nonetheless. In what I’m going to call, when it’s published, The DB Dialogues, all the facets of this type of book are present and correct: reference to the medium itself, an ironic fascination with celebrity, an Umberto Eco-like mystery structure solved at the last, and, most importantly, an unreliable narrator – or, even more postmodernly (not a word, I know) a teasing play of unreliability between the two narrators. It’s also got the extreme irony that the unreality of “David Beckham” is forced out via reference to a hologram – a phantom, an unreal projection, like the Facebook one – of the real David Beckham. Who is, of course, himself a projection of many things: our desires, press myths, cultural iconography and just a bit of the actual bloke with the once-amazing right foot.

Of course, this conversation could have happened with just ordinary e-mail, but only Facebook has created the specific situation where lots of people have created characters – written them, in other words – and posted them online as versions of themselves. These can be famous people, but they can also be fictional personae – I have pending friend requests from among others, Mybol Zaratchin, Dead Meat Movie, and Buster Merryfield (the latter pushing the Facebook “is it really them?” envelope by referencing a famous person – the actor who played Uncle Albert in Only Fools and Horses– who is now dead). Also, the conversation with the fake D. B. occurred, as Facebook messages do, with photos of the sender: thus the words OK, I’m not the real D. B.were accompanied by a beaming photo of Goldenballs himself, the whole image like a very downmarket version of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. I'm talking it up, obviously, and my virtual tongue is in my cybercheek, but I do genuinely think that Facebook has a literary element. The basic reason, on a micro-level, that the internet is so successful, is because it allows individuals to put themselves out there, to create a flag of themselves – of identity – and wave it in a public space, a privilege for so long afforded only to the famous. However, Facebook is the first postthis entity, because it’s a space where some people are subverting that need, and – using fiction – rendering identity uncertain. Which is also the project of the modern – or at at least, as I say, the postmodern – novel.

And just to close the story: having convinced the fake D. B. that I was the real D. B., I told him that I was going to write about our Facebook chats in this column. He then got quite excited, and sent me lots of information about himself. His name is Chris Hirons, he’s a 25-year-old student and he supports Spurs. So now, by pretending to be a famous person, the pretender has achieved a small amount of real fame. The End.

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