The thing about Facebook
Sunday, 28 October 2007
We have had a couple of lovely friends staying with us this weekend, and as Nick and I are 'Facebook Friends', I have variously been able to send him directions to Hotel Merrick via Facebook, 'tag' him, his wife Hannah and Ben in a couple of photos I took whilst we explored the gorgeous city of Durham on Saturday, play 'Scrabulous' with him, and receive notification that they arrived home safely this evening. All of this could have been achieved without actually holding a conversation with him (although it wasn't - we spent more of this weekend talking and catching up than doing anything else), which seems to be the essence of a problem which many people of my age (and older) have with Facebook. Since the likes of Rory Cellan-Jones signed up to it and began writing and broadcasting about the concept of online social networking, with reference to Facebook in particular because it has become the place to be for people aged anywhere between 18 and 60 (younger people tend to stick with MySpace and Bebo), a long line of journalists have been scornfully dismissing this trend as the technological equivalent of mutton dressing as lamb. Stop using it as an excuse to check up on your teenagers! Leave it to the kids! they cry, listing several reasons why it is ridiculous and pathetic for any self-respecting adult to be going around collecting 'friends' (don't you have enough real friends already?), writing on 'walls' (wasn't that once known as graffiti?), joining 'groups' (why not join one for real, containing three-dimensional people - a choir, perhaps?) and taking part in movie quizzes (wouldn't going to the cinema or theatre be a better use of your time?). It's nothing more than self-indulgent ego-boosting and a waste of precious time, apparently.
Well, yes and no. It's true that 'Competitive Facebooking' does exist; it's quite clear to me that a fair few people who I know slightly only sent 'friend requests' in my direction with the intention of boosting their own number of 'friends', as these characters have never actually taken the time to write on my wall since I accepted their offer of 'friendship' or used Facebook to gain any sort of meaningful insight into my life - 'poking' doesn't count as profound social interaction, and nor does a quick browse through the endless photos that everyone displays in albums labelled 'Uni shizzle' or 'My Friends' (I'm a bit old for the former, but admit to having an album containing photos of the latter, including a mildly amusing one of a cartoon bat which I tagged using Nick's name, which I do realise is neither mature nor particularly funny to anyone except us, but given that my privacy settings are so high I don't show up on Facebook searches and therefore can't be located and 'poked' by any of my pupils at school, no one else needs to either see my photos or find them funny - I don't feel the need to share the details of my life with all and sundry, in common with plenty of other 'older' Facebookers). On this basis, I regularly carry out 'Facebook Friend Audits' during which I remove people from my list who don't actually use Facebook to contact me despite their initial tantalising offer of 'friendship'; this probably sounds rather unkind but is actually no worse than buying a new address book and failing to transfer the details of someone with whom you've mutually fallen out of contact, and should be seen as such by anyone whose 'friendship' I've 'removed' (assuming they've noticed, which I doubt!). What is the point of having 100 'friends' (or, more importantly, being one of someone's 386 'friends') if you only maintain any sort of meaningful contact with 10 of them? Presumably the idea is that people can look at your list and be impressed by your overwhelming popularity. Well, I'm not going to act as a boost to someone's ego by doing nothing more than sitting mutely on a list! And in the same way that I am incredibly tired of seeing Amy Winehouse stumbling, stoned, out of some hotel room, beehived and kohled to the max, on the front page of at least one newspaper per week, or Kerry Katona or the front page of every single magazine every single week, I am not riveted by the exclusive news that someone I hardly know and never speak to has posted a new video or updated their 'status'.
Having said that, the majority of the people on my 'friends' list are actually my friends - people I care about and who (I believe) genuinely want to hear my news and see my photos. So I keep them on my list and keep Facebooking, because I like the way Facebook allows me to say hello to them when they live hundreds of miles away, write them a long letter which they can read quickly even when there's a postal strike on (although I will always prefer the experiences of writing and receiving a proper, ink-on-paper letter), play Scrabble with them (I love it, but my husband doesn't, so it's great to have the opportunity to play 8 simultaneous games with other word enthusiasts, rather than unfairly prising him away from the Nintendo DS to play with me), show them photos of things I've been doing and of people they know in an environmentally-friendly manner, and hear their own news in a variety of different ways with a greater degree of ease than is naturally possible nowadays. For example, I have an old friend from my schooldays who is now a tremendously busy musician in London. He is important to me, and I very much want to remain in proper contact with him, but if it wasn't for Facebook (or, at the least, email) the only time I would stand a chance of laying eyes on him or hearing him speak would be when he appears on Songs of Praise or finds time to meet up with me for coffee when we're both home at Christmastime; neither of these options are entirely satisfactory when you're trying to maintain a friendship, and I don't exactly have hours of spare time hanging heavily on my own hands. Now I'm certainly not using Facebook as a way to say 'Look at me! I'm so busy and spend so much time doing other things, it's a miracle I can squeeze in something so time-consuming as having a friendship with you! Be grateful!' but surely it's not much different from using a washing machine instead of a mangle to launder your clothes when you have a full-time job and a house to run and any sort of involvement in, for example, a church or a football team. At university, being a music student with a sparse working week, I had loads of time during which I could (and did) write to friends at great length and spend whole evenings on the phone to them. Now, in my thirties, I have many other ways I need to spend my time but my desire to keep my friends remains undiluted. Facebook means I can not only hear all about my friend's recent visit to the States, but can play Scrabble with him (which may be bizarre, given that neither the board nor the tiles actually exist and we are not sitting opposite each other as we play, but it's still fun) and see photos of the choir he conducts, which genuinely interests me since it is something to which he chooses to devote his time.
Facebook is also useful, in all sorts of ways. Another musician friend of mine recently organised a concert in Durham, and realised to his consternation that his orchestra was several instrumentalists short with only a week to go before the performance. A group called 'Help Needed!' was promptly set up, those of us who played the required instruments were invited to join and to commit to playing in his concert, and before he knew it my friend was inundated with offers not only from his own friends, but friends of theirs who had been contacted by those in the group and who also met the criteria he had specified. The concert was a success, and Nik was spared the tiresome nuisance of having to 'phone round every musician he knew in the area and implore them to pass on a message to every violinist they knew within a twenty-mile radius who might be free that evening and prepared to attend an afternoon rehearsal beforehand, and then phone him back to pledge their support. Another friend of mine has been able to get in touch with other Christians who suffer from bipolar disorder; on a far more frivolous note, my brother has set up a group dedicated to the fantastic Brian Thompson, former deputy head of Wirral Grammar School for Boys; it has almost 200 members who have all shared hilarious anecdotes from their schooldays and made me, for one, laugh an enormous number of times in the same way I used to laugh fifteen years ago when my brother would impersonate Thommo at the dinner table.
One of the many criticisms levelled at social networking is that it is all so public, reducing friendship to a spectator sport and therefore diminishing its significance. On the contrary, Facebook has a 'messaging' option which is a way of communicating privately, and I use that when I'm sharing personal or sensitive information or asking my friends about something important or difficult that they may be experiencing. Equally, the 'writing on wall' option means I can say a quick hello or join in a communal 'conversation' with other people or other friends - the equivalent of a gathering of friends. Given that the vast majority of my friends, and all of my family, live miles away, Facebook means I can keep in touch as closely as we would all like and, in some cases, maintain a community that may, for reasons of distance and lack of time, have lapsed.
I completely agree that Facebook and its ilk should not be used as a way of communicating without actually talking to each other, or as a way of showing off one's vast and artificially increasing social circle, and can become a colossal waste of time if you end up sitting next to the laptop all night, constantly checking for new messages and Scrabulous moves and not doing much else. For a while I fell into that trap myself, but have now wised up and realised that I could be, for example, a much better pianist if I devoted more time to practising and less to Facebooking. It shall henceforth be thus, since I do want to be a better pianist. But if you see Facebook not as a fishing net or a screen on which to project your life to everyone with whom you've ever come into contact, but as a quick and convenient way to reach out to people you love but who you can't always manage to get on the phone in these times of 10-hour working days and extra-curricular activities, it could be the saviour, or at least improver, of a friendship or two. In my humble opinion, it's worth it just for that. So before I make dinner, I'm just going to go and log on so I can wish one or two of my friends a happy week, but I won't be frittering away the last four hours of my half-term holiday wading through endless drunken photos of near-strangers or seeing which of my friends have written on who else's wall and getting insecure about why they haven't written on mine. That really is a waste of time!
posted by fiona @ 17:51
