Facebook – an online community of millions of potential farmers and gangsters with a side order of restaurant owners and gamblers. This appears to be quite an odd mixture on paper but wrap them all up in HTML and Flash encodings and you’re left with a mega-rich tycoon who wouldn’t pass on the extra toppings. However, remove this and you’re left with the bread without the butter, a person who has been sucked into a virtual world of fantasy. A world where the past becomes as pixellated as the quality of the camera-phone it was captured on and where repressed memories of the time you got your head stuck in a tree glisten as they once did, if only from the perspective of the ‘lolling’ onlookers… Your friends.
Right now, Facebook really is “where it’s at”. It knows everything before you do; it knows who’s going where and at what time, it knows who’s going through a rough patch in their relationship and sadly it remembers the nights you’ve forgotten and christ, you don’t usually want to be reminded. Regardless of this, it’s always there when you need it. It’s the trusting friend that holds out its hand and helps you rummage through priceless memories from a time when you once had a life outside of this social exclusion zone. You might think that broadcasting your daily-doings to your friends (we’ll call them comrades from now on) proves that you have a life away from your plain profile page, when in fact all you can see when you type it is your lonely reflection staring back at you from inside your computer monitor, almost as if you really are trapped in this virtual reality.
A few weeks into your stay everything seems to be going swimmingly – you’ve got your profile, you have your comrades, you have your farm in Dorset and you have the odd half-decent photo scattered among many of what can only be described as ‘atrocities’. Where can it honestly all go wrong? Well, remember that person who’s had your heart ever since you can remember? That’s right, they’re now married to someone you’re “obviously better than”, they have four kids and they live in Angola. Chances of bumping into them randomly in your local Starbucks? Pretty slim. That person who’s owed you fifty of your Great British Pounds from when you didn’t shave for three years? He’s in jail for a chain of murders, good luck getting that back. Oh and who can forget that bastard who used to beat you up for your lunch money? He’s just won multiple-millions in the lottery, there goes your belief in Karma then. Ah well, at least you still have your farm, but OH WAIT! You forgot to get someone to tend to your crops while you were in Spain for a week drinking vodka on the beach – yet another week you can’t remember, but at least the photos will be online soon. Looks like all of those hours of loving care have also been wasted. Facebook appears to have an evil and relentless underbelly.
This leads me very nicely onto what seems to be one of the key features of Facebook: changing your ‘status’. Now this is presented to you in the form of a very personal question, “what’s on your mind?” This encourages you to think about what you’re planning on telling your comrades next. Did you have a nice breakfast? Have you had a funny thought cross your mind that you just have to share with the ‘world’? Or of course there’s my personal favourite, who’s got on your nerves today who you fancy having a spiteful dig at? This all gets added to the ‘news feed’ which is there to make you think that everything you do has a certain amount of importance that’s on an equal par with, let’s say, the war on the terror. This isn’t real news. If someone’s turned the world on its head and had chicken nuggets for breakfast and lunch but had a bowl of cereal for tea, nobody cares. Whereas, if someone updates their status to “just killed my neighbour while having sex with a donkey ROFL” and means it then this would be news. In essence though, nobody ever does that.
Then you have the growing number of ‘fan pages’ where you can show your appreciation for whatever subject appears in the title. These are just getting more and more ridiculous, so much so that I’m pretty sure that there won’t be much more to become a fan of. Currently the ‘trend’ doing the rounds seems to be racist ‘jokes’ about turbans looking slutty or wondering if your arse looks too big while wearing one. Sure, it’s not the worse form of racism around but when you go on these pages and you see the obscene comments coming from some chavvy twelve year old kids, you can’t help but wonder why they haven’t been shot yet to stop them growing up into the future generation of prison fodder and a waste of the tax payers hard-earned cash.
But despite all of these clear problems, millions of people are hooked to the site. They want to know what their friends had for breakfast and what they’re going to do this evening. This is what Facebook is really about – staying in touch with your friends new and old and finding new ways to ‘connect’ with them that ultimately lead to bringing them closer, even if they do live on the other side of the world. If anything, modern society has become reliant on the social networking phenomena. Sites such as this make life so much easier for so many of the users; can’t be bothered to buy party invites? No problem, just go on facebook and select your friends before simply clicking ‘send’ to give them all of the information they need to know, all at the same time. What if you don’t know the address of an old colleague but you still want to contact them? Just simply send them a message or write on their wall. It even brings you closer to people you don’t really know, even with things as simple as the ‘poke’ application.
Social networking is bringing the world closer together. I’m a member of Facebook and if I left it now I’d feel left out, I’d feel slightly neglected and most of all I’d have no way of keeping in touch with so many people, even if I don’t contact them on there. In reality, it would be like cutting myself off from the outside world from the inside of my computer monitor.
Facebook = Twitter
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