The Facebook Phenomenon

I wrote about Facebook here, in November, 2005, just a few weeks after I had created my own Facebook account. At that time, Facebook was available only to university students, faculty, and staff - not to the public at large (although you have to be 13 years old to join.) I am not too sure when Facebook "opened its doors" to anyone, and I really do not know to what extent this has changed the landscape of this "social networking website."

What I do know, however, is that Facebook is huge among my students and, frankly, I am absolutely miffed by this phenomenon. I have seen students spend literally hours browsing their friends' Facebook pages, and heard them discuss Facebook at length. The other day, one of my students told me that about a student whom we both know (and whom I like very much, by the way), who, in a moment of very deep inebriation, had posted a long diatribe about an ex-girlfriend on Facebook - which he had removed the next morning, upon having sobered up (I never saw the text he had posted, it was down way before I could get to Facebook to read it. Actually, I am not sure whether or not I would really have wanted to read it.)

In spite of the fact that I do have a Facebook account, as I mentioned it in the previous paragraph, I fail to grasp the true value of interacting with "friends" on Facebook - except that I have been able to keep in touch, but only very very superficially, with people on Facebook. For example, I occasionally check the pages of some of my daughter's old high school friends who, at some point or other, became my Facebook "friends." I also occasionally check on my own students just to see with whom they are interacting on Facebook - it is generally beyond uninteresting. Not long ago, I was able to reconnect with a young German woman who taught one course at my school last semester, and who has now relocated to Istanbul (Turkey), and that was kind of cool. But, of course, no conversation that anyone has on Facebook is ever deep or significant. With the advent of the age of texting and of exchanging snippets of meaningless electronic discourse, are we losing track of what constitutes a meaningful conversation or interaction with another human being? Is interacting with each other on Facebook or MySpace.com actually "meaningful"?

My take on this is that it may not be "meaningful," but it is certainly significant, and it's a phenomenon of such amplitude that it cannot be discounted as mere drivel. Heck, there are people out there making tons of money out of interactive websites, and, according to the Wikipedia article on Facebook (I know, it's a shitty source, but that's all I had time to consult), that company is worth at least one billion dollars (although, according to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, it is not for sale.) According the latest biennial Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study, conducted in the spring of 2006 (I guess the results of a new survey should be out very soon), Facebook came second as the most popular thing among undergraduates, tied with beer, only being ranked lower than the iPod" (USA Today, 6/7/2006.)

Of course, the last thing I should address about Facebook is how inappropriate photos and comments are often posted on that site, and how there is a huge privacy issue tied to all of this. Kids often seem to be oblivious of the fact that everything they put on the internet becomes instantaneously public, regardless of guarantees of privacy given by sites like Facebook. Thus, employers (and I really do not know how they do this, but I know that they do) check out prospective employees on Facebook, which may sometimes lead them to reject a candidate because of photos, opinions, or even bad writing found on his/her Facebook page (for more on this, click here.) Most colleges try to address this issue with their students, especially as they approach the end of their senior year and are beginning to look for jobs.

All in all, I think that the Facebook phenomenon will still last for a while - although I believe that it will soon be replaced by another, new and cooler fad. We had Napster, we had Livejournal, we now have Facebook - what will be next?