We’re all Friends here, You Know…

Facebook, as Ms. Tina Turner would say, is simply the best. If one were to come up with a more ingenious idea for a social media platform, I could not improve upon Facebook. It has become the communication platform for over two billion users of all ages (as of 2017). I would guesstimate it’s superceded only by email, the smartphone and the television in popularity and use. Facebook is so clever in its design, it actually employs all the features of email, the phone and the television, having within its increasingly matrix like structure, all kinds and sorts of channels and groups and live video feeds, as well as online chat, facetime and the capacity to call any one user or group from anywhere to anywhere, just so long as you have a Facebook account and an internet link. Its scope is unlimited as it transcends national boundaries, political parties, religion, or age. After live video, pictures, speech, music and the billions of words typed into the Facebook, it is only a matter of time before we all log into Facebook with a retinal scan, post comments via voice recognition software, and chat with Mom or our boyfriend via live holographic interface. Like the web itself, the phenomenon of what happens on Facebook is simply astonishing. Births, deaths, marriages, and events of international and national importance are shared and discussed with forensic detail all times of the day or night. Its also a huge online gaming platform. For instance, every second there are twenty thousand people using it, and, as a result of this level of usage, its functionality is constantly being worked upon.

This is the era of privacy, or the lack of it. For instance I am typing this on WordPress. Above the screen where I type these words, the wordpress program has worked out my location to within a metre or two. When I press ‘Update’, that location is confirmed public for all to see. This is cyberspace, where everything is connected and everything leaves a data trail. The first rule of forensics is that every action leaves a trace. Its interesting. We are surrounded by cheap but sophisticated technology. If your cell phone locates you twenty four seven, and Amazon knows what books you buy or search for, and Google knows your searches and your location, as well as your email address book, then Facebook knows your friends, what you are interested in, and what you and your friends look like, your every action leaves a searchable forensic data trail, forever. A data trail exists now for everything we do. Saying we have nothing to fear if we do no wrong is the first and last cry of an authoritarian state. Privacy is not a privelige. Facebook (and the other aforementioned companies) were founded in the USA. In the USA there are very weak privacy laws. Privacy isn’t codified either in the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights. When you post pictures, then FB owns your image. In fact it has been pointed out the reason why Facebook is free to join is simply because the psychographics and data amassed by one’s posting activity on FB actually makes you and I their product.

                            What is Facebook?

Facebook is a place to connect virtually. Facebook is the biggest metadata marketplace on the planet. FB is a blogspace, a place where religion is practised, a human rights platform,  a place where missing persons are searched for (and found), a marketing tool, an advertising goldmine, a political forum, a dating and sexting site, and somewhere you can meet new people and talk about how much you like puppies or porn or classic science fiction. There are so many new people on facebook – people with lives and biographies and loves and hates and favourite music and bands and websites and marriages and divorces and children and billions of pictures of cats and babies, all there for you to explore. Its absorbing, and creates an increasingly complete dossier available to FB sales and marketing for every FB user. As an inveterate snoop, I have whiled away whole evenings just browsing through all of the human Facebook drama. I can only imagine how useful and lucrative it must be for FB itself. So what does one do on Facebook? You make ‘friends’ on Facebook. Right now you can have up to five thousand ‘friends’. Interestingly one of the many signs of modern loneliness (an experience which is quickly becoming a social epidemic in our ever connected wired up urban and suburban world), is when you have far more friends on FB than you have in real life. Virtual friends will never supercede human contact. Nevertheless, when the platform gets even bigger, along with bandwith and personal and corporate computers growing ever more powerful, I am sure the friend-number will increase. Its scope is, really, unlimited. Right now its worth $403 billion, which is a simply astounding number, considering this is 2017 and it was only founded twelve years ago, its becoming an internet in and of itself, rather like Google, except its not Google. Google is focused on information. Its founders are interested in designing Artificial Intelligence. Facebook is about people, and thats why it is talked about so much. Google, so much a part of the very substance of much internet work is simply a piece of the architecture upon which the web is built. Facebook provides the places we meet people. Facebook is kind of like a city, whereas Google is rather like the State wherein the city has been built.

Whats On Your Mind?

Facebook wants to know whats on your mind. The above question, along with a text box and a facility for posting pictures and videos appears at the top of one’s personal feed.  So, straight away we have a means to speak our minds and possibly be heard by, well, everyone. One can also see whats on other peoples minds, from just how much they don’t like Donald Trump, to holiday photos, to photos of meals and fleatrap hotels, to medical updates, to whines about hangovers and boyfriends, to adorable baby seals and crazy stunts, and of course bazillions of puppy and cat videos. It’s incredible. Its an information overload of unprecedented proportions. All of life trots across ones FB webpage. That, and the chance to go wandering around others’ lives becomes an all consuming and vastly time-consuming interest. This is especially the case if you start commenting or posting status updates of one’s own, and the dynamic of posting and reposting status updates becomes a kind of game of reciprocal virtual ping-pong that has no beginning or no end. It goes on an on like a Wagner Opera. Every time we post something, well it’s forever. Every post and comment and ‘like’ is there – forever. Even the things we delete are ‘remembered’, and everything we say -it says something as much about ourselves as it does about the topic of our post. Did I mention data analysis? Everything we type is analysed. Every contact is analysed.

And stored And calibrated. Profiles are built. Our styles of commenting are analysed. Our photos, our arguments – all stored. Those we friend or unfriend or block is part of our profile. I recently unfriended a rather unpleasant FB friend and was reminded by FB on my ‘feed’ that they ‘noticed’ I unfriended someone. But don’t worry, I was told. FB won’t tell this third party I unfriended them. they’ll keep mum. How reassuring, I thought. How kind, even.

Don’t forget too, that all the main security services of the world are here too. All the big names, and a few unnameables. They keep a vigilant watch over every single user – for freedom demands that kind of eternal vigilance. Oh, and data is shared by international agreement. Everything is logged and stored. I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that privacy is now something we tell ourselves we have. But we don’t. If the Internet is forever, then Facebook is the Hotel California. You can log out any time you like, but you can never leave. Your page is there for you long after you deactivate your page. All you got to do is log right back in and your stuff is there for you. Thats great, right?

I Can Stop Using Facebook Anytime I want, I just ‘Like’ it

Facebook is both addictive and its evolving, like a hive or a virtual lifeform. Its tools are becoming more and more refined and those aspects of it which serve no purpose are removed or corrected. They got an army of programmers and analysts all over that platform. Two aspects of FB though I bet will never disappear. One is the capacity to comment on posts, and the big second is the ‘Like’ Button. I think few of us really acknowledge the creeping aspect of ones attachment to using the Facebook platform. You get your account and you start off small. One post here. One ‘Like’ there. One picture of your lovely girlfriend on holiday, and then the ‘Likes’ start coming. You got a new job, or in my case, get published in a prestigious journal and you humblebrag about it and then people start ‘Liking’. The most powerful virtual tool right now is the Facebook ‘Like’ button. One ‘ Like’ and you get a little endorphin kick. A dose of Oxytocin (aka the ‘hug drug’). Facebook is liking. One can keep contact with old friends without the huge time consuming committment. One can go finding out stuff – satisfy our infomania. One can quantify our friendship quotient and fill the deepest need we have in this increasingly atomised culture – the need to belong, to be part of a group, to have that deep sense of support and contact. Facebook be loving us. Don’t go, it says. Thus to leave Facebook in the light of the social, interpersonal, political and cultural advantages it offers as a free platform, is a huge emotional wrench. It is no exaggeration to say that Facebook is addictive. It should come with a warning. Like sugar, the most addictive substance on the planet, Facebook is sweet and reassuring and omnipresent. And it’s truly a demon one has to exorcise from one’s system once one decides to leave.

Detoxing From facebook

Lastly, aside from the vast, vast, waste of time that is Facebook, Facebook makes one jealous. Perhaps ‘envy’ is the right word. Perhaps both. Facebook is saddening. We ‘see’ that version of others’ lives on Facebook and we want what they have. People can’t help humblebragging. Let me unpack that. For instance: recently a ‘friend’ mentioned he was logging off FB because he had to take time out to edit his recently completed novel, which sends a message of success to all the other FB writers out there, and makes me anguished personally as I take forever to finish anything, what with my sitting on my bum thinking all the damn time. Another talks about how busy she has been of late and in sweet terms – and then agave sweetly apologizes to her Facebook friends beacuse she was away on a fabulous holiday with her new lover. Another posts pictures of their new baby, another talks about her new job or that particular prestigious poetry journal she got into, another is busily trekking across France, another is writing a blogpost. And on and on. Nobody wants to talk about daily disasters. Moreover, people seem to be living the lives of movie stars and celebrities. No one seems to be failing or screwing up, like we all fail and screw up – far more than we succeed. And this is the problem. It creates a culture of competition, of a sense of inadequacy and consequent over compensation that has been commented on and analysed by many, many psychologists and podcasters and online journals (GO GOOGLE). Of course, ones self-worth should have nothing to do with the lives of others, that is, in an ideal world. Perhaps if we focused our energies on real life, none of this would happen. Perhaps if we stopped Facebook, went cold turkey and supported each other in coming off this addictive virtual experience, we might take the energy we are using online and made more creative uses of our lives. Maybe. Peace. O.