After they shut down Scrabulous, I almost took all my information off there with the intention of using it as a tool to get in touch with old friends, who could then contact me by message and subsequently email me, and wrote a post here about it. I ended up not doing this, largely because it seemed silly to object to having my info on Facebook and then post it on a blog (a Google blog, no less) as if that was making some kind of point, and it sits in my draft folder to this day, but this is what I thought, and still think, about Facebook's usefulness purely as a medium of communication:
Back in the days before mobiles and internet, I used to be able to remember people's phone numbers, I used to ring them to chat, I used to write proper letters. Then, communication got compressed into 180-character texts and short emails, but at least I used to email people. Since all-you-can-eat broadband and 'social networking', however, I don't seem to do that any more. I have the illusion of connectedness - I feel constantly in touch with hundreds of people, yet I spend less actual time maintaining relationships than I did before targeted advertising made any of this worthwhile.(The draft also ended with an invitation to people to visit me in my actual house and play with my actual Scrabble set. This offer still stands, with the caveat that I actually know you and you give me some warning.)
Recently, though, I've started taking some information off there, a little at a time. Last week I purged my friends list, mostly of friends of the boy's that I was trying to get in with when I came back from Africa, but whom I never really knew and whom he doesn't speak to much any more either. I've been trying to publish an article or two under my actual name and while this hasn't been an unmitigated success, the process of it made me more aware of what is in the public domain and attached to my name. (An egotistical self-google reveals little connected to me - the bad adolescent poems have fortunately been taken down and even the Facebook result is some person in Tulsa with the same name as me.) It's also made me conscious of who I freely and willingly allowed to see all this info through Facebook - as it turns out, a lot of people I don't know very well at all!
I suppose fundamentally, I see Facebook as trivial and frivolous - I use it to keep in touch with friends, share photos and not for self-promotion or professional networking - and when it intersects with something that is serious, I don't know how to handle it yet. Someone I knew passed away last year, and I find it incredibly freaky when her picture pops up in the 'friends in common' box, or to know that she made several incredibly self-deprecating remarks about some of the most recent photos of her.
Like much of the internet, the curious juxtaposition of transience and permanence has yet to settle down. I suspect people my brother's age will grow up absolutely fine with it, whereas people of my parents' generation (and particularly those who share my mother's technophobic leanings) just think the whole thing is bizarre, and there's a bunch of us in the middle torn between, 'Wow, that's really weird,' and, 'Wow, that's cool.'
Why am I thinking about this now, particularly? We were having lunch with Nik's mum yesterday and she decided to join Facebook! I think my complacency about Facebook privacy is largely because I don't think there is anything particularly incriminating on there, but nevertheless I had a quick scan before allowing her unfettered access to my profile.
In other news, I saw the film of Brick Lane and they managed not to totally obliterate the wonderfulness of the book. It was close, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment