You Have To Be Logged In To Do That
March 15th 2008 12:26
I've just read yet another article bemoaning the perils of social networking sites, and my ire can stay silent no longer. Social networking sites are not evil, and I'm going to tell you why. (Also, for the purposes of brevity, I'm going to refer to them here as one single entity: FaceSpace, if you will.)
The first argument goes something like this: "FaceSpace is bad because it means people now socialise online instead of in person."
The second argument -- mostly buoyed by the teenager who made world headlines by sending out a bulletin on the FaceSpace telling people about a party he was throwing that night, causing five hundred teens to turn up, closely followed by the riot squad -- goes like this: "FaceSpace is bad because it brings too many people together in person!"
These conflicting arguments against such sites have become muddled and confused, and clearly boil down to the following subtext: "FaceSpace is bad because when I was a kid we didn't have anything like this and I really don't know how to adapt to new things and so because I don't understand it I'm deciding it's one of society's Great Evils."
I'll come back to that point later. First, it's important to admit that, yes, FaceSpace does have its downsides. Like phone texting, it encourages people to write in an horrific, abbreviated fashion (ie: "gr8! c u ltrz"... although -- and this is true -- my 78 year old grandmother sends me text messages with abbreviated text speak, but I forgive her because (a) she's a published author, (b) she knows where the commas and semi-colons are supposed to go, (c) she can't type out messages with extreme speed, and so cutting down on her typing time is important, and (d) it's endearing when she does it). FaceSpace does sometimes result in lots of people dropping in unexpectedly when they discover someone's throwing a party. And it makes it a lot easier for some fifty year old trucker in Fremantle to pose as a fifteen year old girl in order to get to know other fifteen year old girls. Yes, FaceSpace does have its perils.
However, I'm a staunch defender of it, because I think it has many more advantages than disadvantages. There are an awful lot of people I want to keep in contact with, but there are so many hours in the day, and I find it to be a very convenient way to keep in indirect, and occasionally direct, contact with them. It's a handy way to socialise with friends who may be on the other side of the country, or even the planet. It's a very easy way to track down somebody you may not otherwise be able to track down. (Of course, if you're someone who doesn't want to be tracked down, this won't be a plus.)
One of the things that stood out in this recent anti-FaceSpace article was a key piece of evidence presented by the writer. The evidence, of course, turned out to be entirely anecdotal. Apparently, a friend of his recently mentioned that they'd spent their Saturday night on FaceSpace whilst drinking alone. This, according to the article's author, was abhorrent! Shut it down! These sites discourage person-to-person contact!
Of course, Alarmed Journalist is clearly looking at it wrong. He assumes that his friend was on FaceSpace interacting with people instead of going to some party that might be on. That's like assuming that DVDs replaced videotapes or that mobile phones replaced land lines. They didn't. If his friend had said "I spent Friday night watching the cricket and drinking beer... had a great time!", would the journalist be insisting that television be abolished? Perhaps; it depends on how old he is. There's still many left in the generation that believes television destroyed society (and though this feeling is shared by those outside of the generation, it's the uniform majority I'm talking about). What if he'd drunk half a bottle of red whilst reading Hemingway? Is he still wasting his life away? Truth be told, there's nothing wrong with reading Hemingway by yourself or watching the cricket by yourself. If the journalist's friend had nothing else to do that night, why not spend it online, interacting with people he'd be otherwise unable to see? Isn't that less anti-social than watching TV or reading?
Far more seriously than Saturday nights spent hunkered over a monitor is the case of the two girls who had made a pact over FaceSpace to commit suicide, and did so. Sure enough, there were those who demanded that FaceSpace be shut down because of it. Can we then assume that these people would demand that, had the girls decided to kill themselves over the phone, telephone be disconnected? Or, if the girls had written letters to one another, that literacy be stricken from the education agenda? There were clearly many complex and non-simple factors involved in that tragedy. Suggesting their method of communication is one of them is utterly idiotic.
There is a degree of privacy that is no longer with us, but that's more to do with the internet than the social networking sites. At least on FaceSpace, you can choose what information about yourself you put up. I recently Googled my name (we've all done it) to discover other people had put information about me up there without my knowledge or prior consent. It's nothing too scandalous (when I was fifteen I produced ten issues of a poorly-photocopied fanzine about Doctor Who and other similar TV shows... now you know), but I'm not sure if it's something I would necessarily choose to advertise. But hey, it's out there, and there's nothing I can do about it. Is the internet going anyway? Nope. Are the internet and FaceSpace the same thing? Nope.
Still, I'll admit that even though I've voluntarily put myself out on the FaceSpace, I'm a bit uneasy about the whole thing. Take, for instance, the grand old tradition of breaking up. Back in the good old days, if you ended a relationship, you'd at least be able to move on and leave your baggage behind. This means putting the ex out of your mind and rebuilding your life accordingly. It's incredibly difficult to do that when many of your exes are on FaceSpace with you, and whether you're "friends" with them or not (and I am, at least with a few of them), they can still pretty much keep up to date with what you're up to. And it's hard to not keep up to date with what they're up to, as well. Didn't want to know the details of their next relationship? Too bad. It's in your face.
There's something I'm strongly considering doing. See, I'm fascinated by how you can pretty much collect people from all areas of your life -- primary school, high school, university, places of work, friends-of-friends, family, family friends, etc -- and have them all collected like a living autobiography. I'm really interested in that, and I'm also interested in how we're finally getting a handle on how we're all connected. I always thought that our six degrees of separation was bigger than most people suspected. How many times have you discovered that the person you went to uni with went to high school with the person you now work with? And how coincidental was the manner in which you found out? How many other connections do you not know about? FaceSpace suddenly makes it very easy to work out who knows who, and I've really been blown away by how often you find these connections occurring. That said, the thing I'm considering doing is collecting everyone from all areas of my life, and once I've done that, deleting all my online account. Letting them vanish into thin air. Getting my privacy back.
Whether I end up doing it or not, it would, of course, be entirely my choice. I still have some degree of control over my own privacy, and these sites certainly haven't taken that away.
So why are so many journalists, pundits and commentators afraid of FaceSpace? The answer, I believe, lies with my favourite writer of all time. See, I often wonder what Douglas Adams would have made of FaceSpace. I wonder whether he'd be for or against it. Either way, he'd write his argument with such eloquence and wit that, regardless of his position, I would inevitably end up agreeing with him.
He was a great proponent of new technologies, and whether this would have counted amongst them or not, I think his anti-FaceSpace peers can be best summed up with the following Douglas Adams quote:
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
The first argument goes something like this: "FaceSpace is bad because it means people now socialise online instead of in person."
The second argument -- mostly buoyed by the teenager who made world headlines by sending out a bulletin on the FaceSpace telling people about a party he was throwing that night, causing five hundred teens to turn up, closely followed by the riot squad -- goes like this: "FaceSpace is bad because it brings too many people together in person!"
These conflicting arguments against such sites have become muddled and confused, and clearly boil down to the following subtext: "FaceSpace is bad because when I was a kid we didn't have anything like this and I really don't know how to adapt to new things and so because I don't understand it I'm deciding it's one of society's Great Evils."
I'll come back to that point later. First, it's important to admit that, yes, FaceSpace does have its downsides. Like phone texting, it encourages people to write in an horrific, abbreviated fashion (ie: "gr8! c u ltrz"... although -- and this is true -- my 78 year old grandmother sends me text messages with abbreviated text speak, but I forgive her because (a) she's a published author, (b) she knows where the commas and semi-colons are supposed to go, (c) she can't type out messages with extreme speed, and so cutting down on her typing time is important, and (d) it's endearing when she does it). FaceSpace does sometimes result in lots of people dropping in unexpectedly when they discover someone's throwing a party. And it makes it a lot easier for some fifty year old trucker in Fremantle to pose as a fifteen year old girl in order to get to know other fifteen year old girls. Yes, FaceSpace does have its perils.
However, I'm a staunch defender of it, because I think it has many more advantages than disadvantages. There are an awful lot of people I want to keep in contact with, but there are so many hours in the day, and I find it to be a very convenient way to keep in indirect, and occasionally direct, contact with them. It's a handy way to socialise with friends who may be on the other side of the country, or even the planet. It's a very easy way to track down somebody you may not otherwise be able to track down. (Of course, if you're someone who doesn't want to be tracked down, this won't be a plus.)
One of the things that stood out in this recent anti-FaceSpace article was a key piece of evidence presented by the writer. The evidence, of course, turned out to be entirely anecdotal. Apparently, a friend of his recently mentioned that they'd spent their Saturday night on FaceSpace whilst drinking alone. This, according to the article's author, was abhorrent! Shut it down! These sites discourage person-to-person contact!
Of course, Alarmed Journalist is clearly looking at it wrong. He assumes that his friend was on FaceSpace interacting with people instead of going to some party that might be on. That's like assuming that DVDs replaced videotapes or that mobile phones replaced land lines. They didn't. If his friend had said "I spent Friday night watching the cricket and drinking beer... had a great time!", would the journalist be insisting that television be abolished? Perhaps; it depends on how old he is. There's still many left in the generation that believes television destroyed society (and though this feeling is shared by those outside of the generation, it's the uniform majority I'm talking about). What if he'd drunk half a bottle of red whilst reading Hemingway? Is he still wasting his life away? Truth be told, there's nothing wrong with reading Hemingway by yourself or watching the cricket by yourself. If the journalist's friend had nothing else to do that night, why not spend it online, interacting with people he'd be otherwise unable to see? Isn't that less anti-social than watching TV or reading?
Far more seriously than Saturday nights spent hunkered over a monitor is the case of the two girls who had made a pact over FaceSpace to commit suicide, and did so. Sure enough, there were those who demanded that FaceSpace be shut down because of it. Can we then assume that these people would demand that, had the girls decided to kill themselves over the phone, telephone be disconnected? Or, if the girls had written letters to one another, that literacy be stricken from the education agenda? There were clearly many complex and non-simple factors involved in that tragedy. Suggesting their method of communication is one of them is utterly idiotic.
There is a degree of privacy that is no longer with us, but that's more to do with the internet than the social networking sites. At least on FaceSpace, you can choose what information about yourself you put up. I recently Googled my name (we've all done it) to discover other people had put information about me up there without my knowledge or prior consent. It's nothing too scandalous (when I was fifteen I produced ten issues of a poorly-photocopied fanzine about Doctor Who and other similar TV shows... now you know), but I'm not sure if it's something I would necessarily choose to advertise. But hey, it's out there, and there's nothing I can do about it. Is the internet going anyway? Nope. Are the internet and FaceSpace the same thing? Nope.
Still, I'll admit that even though I've voluntarily put myself out on the FaceSpace, I'm a bit uneasy about the whole thing. Take, for instance, the grand old tradition of breaking up. Back in the good old days, if you ended a relationship, you'd at least be able to move on and leave your baggage behind. This means putting the ex out of your mind and rebuilding your life accordingly. It's incredibly difficult to do that when many of your exes are on FaceSpace with you, and whether you're "friends" with them or not (and I am, at least with a few of them), they can still pretty much keep up to date with what you're up to. And it's hard to not keep up to date with what they're up to, as well. Didn't want to know the details of their next relationship? Too bad. It's in your face.
There's something I'm strongly considering doing. See, I'm fascinated by how you can pretty much collect people from all areas of your life -- primary school, high school, university, places of work, friends-of-friends, family, family friends, etc -- and have them all collected like a living autobiography. I'm really interested in that, and I'm also interested in how we're finally getting a handle on how we're all connected. I always thought that our six degrees of separation was bigger than most people suspected. How many times have you discovered that the person you went to uni with went to high school with the person you now work with? And how coincidental was the manner in which you found out? How many other connections do you not know about? FaceSpace suddenly makes it very easy to work out who knows who, and I've really been blown away by how often you find these connections occurring. That said, the thing I'm considering doing is collecting everyone from all areas of my life, and once I've done that, deleting all my online account. Letting them vanish into thin air. Getting my privacy back.
Whether I end up doing it or not, it would, of course, be entirely my choice. I still have some degree of control over my own privacy, and these sites certainly haven't taken that away.
So why are so many journalists, pundits and commentators afraid of FaceSpace? The answer, I believe, lies with my favourite writer of all time. See, I often wonder what Douglas Adams would have made of FaceSpace. I wonder whether he'd be for or against it. Either way, he'd write his argument with such eloquence and wit that, regardless of his position, I would inevitably end up agreeing with him.
He was a great proponent of new technologies, and whether this would have counted amongst them or not, I think his anti-FaceSpace peers can be best summed up with the following Douglas Adams quote:
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
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