The Social Knotwork

Oh, dearest Facebook, how I do verily loathe thee, let me count the ways…

While I was an early adopter of internet-based functionality (at least the widely available versions in mid-90s), I was more in love with extensive sharing, such as novella-length emails and home-made websites with HTML-based picture albums. I was never such a fan of text snippits & rapid replies, as expected in instant messaging, cellphone texting and what is now known as social networking. I was rather slow to join Friendster, despite the badgering of friends, only joining it towards the end, when Myspace was starting to become rather popular.  Eventually, I joined Myspace, which “everyone” was on, but I never quite understood the point of such things.  I mean, I’d had my own website since 1999, so I had no need for the easy-bake self-promotion on such sites.

During the heyday of Myspace, I had been aware of  Facebook and had a grudging respect for its students only format, which required validated enrolled student “real” users. Don’t get me wrong, I am a great fan of imagination and the internet’s facility for self-invention, but if you’re trying to connect with real people, some of the misleading nonsense that went on in Friendster and Myspace, such as fake accounts for a pet or other fictions could be hugely annoying.   I suppose the high percentage of “real” people on Facebook when it initially became available to the public (and not just students) was key in its rise to the top, though I understand that it now has plenty of musical acts, businesses and other non-individuals (or fake individuals).

In any case, it’s a fact that I have shunned Facebook. I had no intention of ever joining, but did once have to create an account for integration testing at work (which I made completely private and never had any friends). Very nearly all my friends use Facebook, and I frequently get flak for not being on it, so I’ve been mulling it over, trying to understand why I have such an aversion to it. Here are my thoughts:

1. This is unfair, I know, but I feel that using Facebook is cheating at self-promotion; it’s simply too easy. For the hundreds of hours I used to spend crafting my own website with my own painstakingly uploaded digital photos (and homemade thumbnails with links target = “new” for the full size images), it’s a thorn in my side to imagine that anyone could have their own “site” with so much attention, for so little work (not that people don’t invest loads of time using FB, but the mechanics of account/site creation are simple, even more so than Friendster or Myspace as there’s less to customize).  That’s to Facebook’s credit, really – it should be so easy to use; it just raises my hackles as someone who got used to being a special kind of internet user (ha – look at me now, I’m just another whiny blogger).
2. Facebook is telecommunication technology at its worst, driving people towards multitudes of superficial relationships. It has corrupted our 20th century concept of relationships, changing what could be deeply personal friendships into advertisement type relationships. What I mean is that its function (from my outsider viewpoint) seems to be to “like” things, to share entertainment tidbits (or actual advertisements) found on the net and to “broadcast” personal updates, from the trivial (I had a delicious blueberry donut) to the important (Got married, or I have cancer). That may be convenient and result in responses via “comments,” but that shouldn’t replace personal conversations.  I’d find it insulting for someone I cared about not to specifically talk to me about important news, but to simply expect that I’d know about it from obsessively reading their “feed.” Some friends forget to tell me important things, since they’re so used to just posting on Facebook.  I don’t object to FB as an entertainment; the problem is that it seems to supplant healthy, individual relationships with “broadcast” party talk.
3. Facebook friends aren’t real friends; they’re usually mere acquaintances and sometimes not even that. I’ve overheard many times at parties, “Are you on Facebook?” after a brief conversation or even just an introduction, so they can find each other on it later. And I know from other social networks about the random requests from overseas strangers. I don’t really understand this tendency to want to connect with anyone/everyone; it seems like a mild version of mass-stalking / self-celebrification (proving one’s “popularity” with numbers). Not that it’s altogether bad to follow up with those you’ve met and liked, but it seems like people are keen to be connected to every single acquaintance they’ve ever made (including elementary school classmates).  I don’t want to be connected so widely & indiscriminately and I get the sense that it would be bad form to continually reject “friend requests” from non-friends, so it’s easier for me not to join.
4. Facebook is a black hole that consumes time. Many people spend huge amounts of time on Facebook, posting their updates and pictures and reviewing endless streams of others’ updates, likes and pictures; it can even (ironically) derail their offline social lives by taking so much. It can be addictive. Maybe I should be appreciate that people are spending more time on this, because Facebook is much more interactive and positive for the human brain than something completely passive like television, but I find it a bit scary. I could easily be addicted myself, as I love attention, photos and weird internet stuff. And I find it frustrating that so many of my friends are so into it, as if  it could weaken or destroy my real-world friendships simply by my not using this application (which in a few cases, it has).
5. Facebook is gossip central. Recently, Facebook was responsible for outing me as androgyne/crossdresser to some of my coworkers (since a former coworker/friend of mine posted photos of me in a party dress, which were shared with numerous mutual acquaintances). About 10 years ago, I had a very negative experience when I’d mentioned to one of my coworkers (actually, my boss) that I sometimes wear dresses and since then, I’d been careful about who knows at work (in my personal life I don’t care because I can always walk away from bad reactions, but work life is different). Anyways, Facebook blew the lid off that; luckily, no repercussions so far. And I know other kinds of gossip (true and false) can spread like wildfire in such an environment. I guess this is the 21st century world, gossip at hyperspeed, but I don’t have to like it.
6. Facebook is a personal information retailer – it exists to sell your data. Facebook is, of course, a for-profit corporation. While it presumably gets some revenue from “dumb” advertisements, its real profit-maker is collecting user data to sell to marketers which can be used for “targeted” advertising within and without Facebook, and also for other purposes. Other types of online applications act similarly (e.g., some free email programs), but the problem with Facebook doing this is that it is a single entity collecting data from all users who wish to communicate in this manner (unlike your email program, which not everyone needs to use to send emails) and it is not up-front to its users about what data it is collecting and how it will use/share it.

I have some friends and family who are not using Facebook, but it has stayed popular long enough that it appears to be here for the long haul.  I am worried that it may someday become as significant of a communication platform as email or telephone, because I think it has a lot of special problems that those 20th century platforms do not share (or share in a less significant way).

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