Some Reflections on Facebook

So I did my first facebook purge today, so if you're reading this from a link on my facebook, congratulations!  I like you enough to want to know you a little while longer.  About 450 friends dropped done to 241.  It was hard at first, but eventually the names started to blur and it became faster to banish this one time friends and acquaintances from my conscious forever.  And while I certainly did this purge for a reason, I still find facebook a useful tool for keeping in touch with college friends.  In fact, I was looking at one of my groomsmen's old facebook walls (he's not on facebook anymore, but you know how facebook is like the mafia-once you're in you can never leave) and one of his friends made a good statement about facebook's role in our lives.  Since I agree with this stranger completely, I'll just post his comment in lieu of actual original content today:


what's with all the fads and hysterias surrounding facebook? First everyone had to get on to facebook. Then everyone had to refuse to get onto facebook ('cause I'm hip, that's why). Then everyone that refused to get onto facebook got onto facebook. Now all the original people are leaving facebook because of "privacy" issues (maybe not Nick, he's got plenty of other issues to be worried about!). What's gonna happen? Unless your posting seriously jeopardizing material (which you should be smart enough not to do in the first place), are people worried that the big corporations are going to find out that I really dig the new Lady Gaga hit? Oh noes, personalized marketing is coming to give me products tailored to my interests! How horrible! Skynet must be impending. Privacy on facebook is like privacy in real life: a nice thought, but increasingly requiring a deep revision in our very concept of private/public information. I think all this hoopoolah about privacy on facebook stems from some deep, pervasive narcissism that the information that we exhibit about ourselves--which is so important, by the way--should be entirely under our control. That was never the case, and there's no radical decline in the matter here. Just another case of facebook hysteria. Some of it may be legitimate, but mass exodus and large displays of "Hey facebook, I don't dig you anymore" miss the mark.

Facebook, anyway, provides the most similar online experience to face-to-face interaction. Instead of, e.g., blogs which are largely one-way streams of large blocks of information (like a long speech with a short Q&A afterwards--viz. the comments), facebook provides a vehicle for short bursts of spontaneous exchanges and displays of information that can be more or less serious, and more or less robust. I think this is one of the best chances for maintaining a social network in the absence of continuous face-to-face presence, for it constantly affirms the little micro-communications that are the foundation of informal social relationships. This isn't to say that facebook is better than a blog. They serve very different functions for communication. But I do think that facebook is significantly more egalitarian and conducive to maintaining an actual social network.

/rant