Taking a look at Facebook

I wrote this for my course. It's meant to be a 'personal column'. Apparently this first draft is too opinionative at the moment.

"Add me as a friend – but if you delete me after adding me, I will kill you." This was a Facebook message I received from someone who had recently sent me a ‘friend request’ on Facebook. He was not someone I spoke to in 'real life', and so upon receiving his request I joked that "if we become Facebook friends you do realise you’ll have to say hi to me in real life!" He did not appreciate the joke, and instead sent me a torrent of abuse. And I was left wondering why he had added me, and what it means to be ‘friends’ on Facebook.

Perhaps I am unusual in that the only ‘friends’ I have on Facebook are friends. People I will laugh and talk with outside of the cyber-world of ‘liking’, statuses, profile photos and wall posts. But it seems that more and more Facebook ceases to become about connecting with other people in a meaningful way, but about projecting an image of yourself to an online community, many of whom you may barely know. The numbers of friends added is sometimes boasted, as a kind of tally of social proficiency. Similarly, posting on someone’s wall seems to some to be a form of branding, a public display of your closeness to that person. Statuses are posted, like fishing hooks, to elicit a reaction, comments, or validation of some sort from the Facebook community.

The issues of social etiquette on Facebook are also being shaped as more and more people move to this new form of ‘communication’. Jokes about ‘stalking on Facebook’ are abundant, but where is the line really drawn? Is rifling through somebody’s photos ok? Commenting on a wall post that doesn’t directly concern you? How intimate or private is a wall post? Everyone has different ideas about this, and no comprehensive answers have yet been found.

Only the other day, someone made a post on my Wall which made specific reference to a private event being organised. I deleted it, and sent an email asking that they keep any correspondence regarding the event to emails. And it led me to wonder why they decided to make a post on my Wall, given that the contents concerned me alone. The most likely explanation seemed to me to return to what I’ve come to call ‘branding’ – where people very carefully send out a particular image of themselves, through highlighting the people they associate with, the pages they are fans of, the way they choose to represent themselves in their profile photo, and the way they think, through statuses (which some friends have told me they will only send out at ‘prime time’ – e.g. 8pm, to get the highest chance of a response).

It seems to me that people are becoming more conscious of their profile pages, and what they perceive them to say about themselves – I have friends who edit their pages, deleting things they feel don’t fit in with their identity or self-image. And despite the arsenal of communication tools at a Facebook user’s fingertips, there are those who seem lonely. People who ‘like’ and comment on the ‘statuses’ and photos of their ‘friends’ compulsively. People who send out ‘statuses’ voicing isolation, perhaps subconsciously hoping for someone to comfort them with a friendly comment. And when there is no response from their 312 ‘friends’, I suspect it only deepens the feeling of isolation, as some people have suggested to me that they think that if someone fails to respond on Facebook, it suggests that they would ignore you had you said to them in real life, ‘I feel lonely’, for example.

I have caught myself, too, more times than I care to admit, trawling through the cyber-lives of Facebook friends, clicking from one life to the next as if each person’s Facebook activity were a program on television, channel surfing from one profile to the next, until, with the same guilt I feel after watching The View or Dr. Phil during lunch, I close the computer and get outside.
Facebook can be great. But it doesn’t hurt to get it out of your face, step back, and have a good look at Facebook.