For Social Interaction, the Writing’s on the Wall
Friday, April 11th, 2008“Guess who’s going out with who?” gasped my housemate, swaying in my doorway. As the nugget of fresh information was proudly conveyed, it met a reception similar to that of the Olympic torch. In a mixture of consternation and disbelief, heads looked up; eyebrows were narrowed and raised. But no sooner were lips pursed and mouths opened when the collective riposte of this house of academia was pre-empted with the most irrefutable of statements: “It’s true. And if you don’t believe me, Facebook it for yourself.” And a couple of clicks later, it might as well have been gospel.
Facebook is a verb now – a verb with a capital letter, elbowing itself noisily into the public consciousness. Boasting an almost universal penetration amongst University students and booming in popularity with children and adults alike, Mark Zuckerberg’s darling of social networking sites has assumed its position alongside Google in the online élite. With over 69 million registered users, for now heavily concentrated in Europe, Australia and the Americas, Facebook is placed as the world’s sixth most trafficked website by the venerable barometer of online popularity, Alexa; with an estimated twenty thousand million pageviews per day, Facebook is the destination of nearly seven percent of internet users on any one day. Yet the impact of Facebook cannot be quantified in such a fashion, even through figures as mind-blowing as these.
Facebook is addictive and a little insidious; its power is most evident in climates such as my University house. One of its main dangers is that we feel as if we are widening our social circles, whilst in fact we’re becoming increasingly insulated. As I reflect on another hour of Facebooking which could possibly have been spent more productively by actually meeting the friends I feign to be making, I feel rather like I’ve been bitten by some form of parasitic, blood-sucking fly. There’s the initial twinge of disquiet as its jaws plunge through the meniscus of my social life and begin to suck it dry from within. Yet before the pain can be felt the anaesthetic is quickly injected, in the form of an email announcing another wall post from that nice blonde girl from the party, or perhaps a friend request from somebody for whom I held a door open eleven years ago. You know the leeching has begun when you seem to lose hours to Facebook-induced ponderings and airs of indignity: “Why did she reply to his message and not to mine? Am I supposed to be reading something into that status? And why is she courting the Incredible Hulk, anyway?”
By then, it’s probably too late; you’ve joined the Facebook Club. Like any such activity, Facebooking engenders much of its appeal through exclusivity and shared experience. This club’s membership may have grown far too wide for it to be considered esoteric, but Facebook nevertheless possesses its own language and culture. As a Facebooker, you speak of profile pictures and detags and group officerships like gamblers bemoaning that six-card 21 that was snuffed out by dealer blackjack, or tennis players revelling in the memory of that backhand winner that flashed across advantage court.
A friendship that begins on Facebook is often set to be an awkward one. That girl who finds your throwaway wall-to-wall banter remarkably endearing and struggles to repress an affable cyber-giggle at your gentle mockery of a ‘mutual friend’ (a phrase which Facebook has audaciously adopted as if it never existed in real life) will possibly not make for such a natural and prolific conversation partner in the world of face-to face interaction, where both parties lack the crutch of that ‘I Secretly Want To Punch Slow-Walking People in the Back of the Head’ group which they just joined in unison, where the backspace key is sorely missed, and where poking is just plain weird. Part of the issue is that Facebook is redefining friendship. A Facebook friend is often ’someone you know’, or what might better be described as an acquaintance, except that in this case the illusion of affinity is bolstered every time a globule from the torrent of personal information which they’re spraying all over the internet happens to land on your front page. This is the realm of the ‘News Feed’, an aggregator of your friends’ wall posts, activities and status updates which takes ‘hearsay’ to a whole new level. Never have we known of so many people without actually knowing them.
This leads nicely into the widely-publicised privacy implications of Facebook. As a matter of fact, Facebook features a host of privacy settings which are granular yet comprehensive. But are people using them? A sobering thought for any Facebook user: take a look at your last ten wall posts. Now imagine you’re standing in a room filled with members of your network, amongst them several dozen of the aforementioned ‘know-ofs’, and that you’re shouting these ‘personal’ messages across the room to your intended recipient. Not nice, is it? But it gets worse: the last year has seen several cases of high-profile ‘Facebook stalking’ making the news, in which job applicants found their personal lives assessed by their prospective employers, for better or for worse. Oxford University, meanwhile, has made use of evidence gleaned from Facebook to levy punishments upon perpetrators of so-called post-exam ‘trashing’ incidents. The internet, it’s said, is serious business.
Still… not to worry. It’ll all come out in the wash. Besides, I must be going… John’s become ‘It’s Complicated’ with some girl whose Interests include ‘Women’ – time to see if we have any Mutual Friends and fire off a few Messages to dredge up the gossip. If I’m quick, I might even be the one to break the news, supported all the way by the immutable authority of Facebook.