Modern information technology has made portions of it slightly easier. For example, just the ability to send a mass text inviting people to come to your house and make passive-aggressive comments about your cooking instead of having to call them individually is a massive boon. The ability to register and then forget any and all responses is a massive improvement over having to invent graceful ways to extract yourself from stories about the cousin whose name you forget and his epic struggles with manageable gluten intolerance. There are only so many times you can pretend to have dropped the phone into a toilet.
I prefer to host Thanksgiving if we're doing it big-family-style since then at least I can busy myself with the cooking and/or the learned art of Pretend Cooking. Yes, I'm aware the water will boil without my constant stirring of it, but the visual cues of ignited stove burner, heated pot, furrowed brow, escaping steam and an operating cooking utensil are all powerful signals that project to anyone and everyone in the room (thank you modern open-floorplan home design!) that I am not obligated to pretend to be interested in your home refinancing story. I mean, Look at all these people I have to cook for! Sure you can buy an apron that says "Fuck Off, I'm Busy," but there's an example of redundancy if I've ever heard it.
But I don't always cook, so I've been comfortable hiding out in the Room of Exile where the brothers- and sons-in-law sit together nursing their domestic beers and pretending to watch a shitty football game between teams none of us care about with the sound all but muted.
I come from an egregiously large family (I have 30 first cousins. On just my mom's side. I'm not kidding), so the potential for conflict is always just under the surface. There's always someone not talking to someone else at any given point of the year, so it's not usually worse during the holidays to any noticeable degree. A spat can last a few hours or decades, depending on the combatants, but being good Catholic white people, we're usually able to white-knuckle** our way through it with just the right amount of alcohol distributed and the prospect of pie.
A further complicating source of potential danger looms, however: facebook is inventing a whole new way to alienate your family by introducing the dislike button. I think the idea is that there's currently no non-awful way to single-click respond to "Hey guys, my dog has cancer" or some such except to click LIKE, a mixed message at best. Option B is to actually take the time to type something out, but if you use facebook the way I do, the goal is to get in and get out without having used any time productively for myself or any other humans I may or may not know. I will admit though that typing in the 78th version of "So sorry" in the comments comes pretty close to Total Meaninglessness.
The way it will actually be used (or misused I guess, given the intent) is something that people interviewed in stories about it are really going out of their way to willfully pretend not to understand, like so:
Prof Andrea Forte, an expert in social and participatory media at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said users will not suddenly turn on each other's posts.
In an email, she wrote: "They may use a dislike button to express some negative emotions (like frustration with ads popping up in their feeds) but I doubt it will cause them to start wantonly disliking pictures of their friends' babies, dogs, cats and cooking experiments.
"I suspect it will mainly be used to express mild disapproval, or to express solidarity when someone posts about a negative event like a death or a loss."
Andrea Forte has managed to be a professor of something or other at a school I've actually heard of (thanks NCAA basketball tournament!) and yet has apparently never seen the internet. It is understood that the internet is a place where you'd almost have to expect an unrelenting stream of profanity and racial slurs bracketed by wishes for your violent death and the accompanying deaths of your family, friends and all members of your social subgroup for the arguably forgivable crime of finishing ahead of someone else at Mario Kart or any equivalent thereof. A dislike button is only going to be used to express disapproval in the mildest and slightest way that is by far the most likely to be wildly misinterpreted in almost every case as a challenge to the core integrity of someone's personhood.
I'm on facebook because I'm over 20 and the rest of technology scares me. I'm incredibly grateful that I was able to partner up with someone from OK Cupid (the comfortably blue-hued facebook of dating sites for people who didn't have the immune system required to try out Craigslist) before Tinder showed up with all its fast-paced swipey-swipey. I take a lot of comfort in the innocuous blandness of facebook, dominated by pictures of people's children and ecards and memes expressing everyone's hate of Mondays or (if you're a white lady) love of coffee or (if you're also a white lady) love of wine. Sure, everyone's got one or two vile racists in their feed, but they can be silently de-friended or muted or just ignored. You generally only make the mistake of engaging once or twice before realizing facebook does not exist to solve problems. Not one problem. It's 700 million people with their social setting toggled to Project, never to Receive unless of course they are receiving something already tuned to the thing they just projected. So you get burned once or twice. You're not going to convince grandma that Obama's not behind this vaccine-autism thing she's certain she read about. So you just let it lie and if anyone asks about in her real life, you can just tell them she died when you were 11 and get on with your day.
This "dislike" button, though... it feeds right in to all the worst features of internet interaction. If it's anything like the "like" button it will be simple, omnipresent, minimally engaging and attention-grabbing, promising an immediate visceral payoff in publicly registered disapproval, the internet's Coin of the Realm, that we used to only be able to get by talking shit behind someone's back or silently shaking our heads in judgment in someone else's hand-basket of Jim Beam and Cherry Garcia on the supermarket checkout conveyor belt in front of us.
That thumbs-down will say all we wanted to say. Where before we would have mentally elided the whole diatribe or ill-thought-out link, whatever it happened to be about, as we scrolled past, now there will be no way the icon goes unclicked, never to be taken back. And if your family is anything like mine, when we're all in the same room, we'll pretend we didn't notice the five, ten, two dozen times it might have happened in the previous year, but at some point between the stuffing and the sweet potatoes it will all come out. Never with a raised voice or a direct human confrontation, no, just maybe in a specifically measured response to what everyone else thought was a particularly funny story or in the pointed way one might point out how "brave" another is to be over fifty and still single.
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*Apologies to my Australian and New Zealand readership. I'd feel worse about the Northern-Hemisphere-centrism if you as a contingent weren't entirely imaginary.
**There's woefully little other choice of color there amongst my people.
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