Why I hate facebook

I’m part of the eGeneration and we don’t care for traditional grammar. We own iPods, shop on eBay, spend hours on YouTube. So now it must be time to hop onto the web’s latest bandwagon – the social networking site, facebook. Oh please, don’t make me LOL.

For the uninitiated, here’s a bluffer’s guide to facebook. But if 25 million people worldwide are signed up to it, what’s the problem with facebook?

For me, it’s not the recent stories about the privacy problems that surround the site. It’s the pointless and annoying competition the website arouses. As facebook is the latest thing “everyone’s doing”, there’s bound to be hundreds of people you know who are also doing it. They become your facebook friends. But after that, any random encounter is treated by many as a reason to become “friends” online. The distinction between friend, acquaintance, and person you acknowledge with a cursory nod has become dangerously blurred.

Facebook has descended into a tedious popularity contest. “Look, look I have more friends than you do – there’s a tally that proves it”. No, it doesn’t. It might mean you have more friends of a friend, or more likely, friends of a friend of a friend. One guy I met told me that he wanted to be the first guy he knew to have sex with someone they’ve met through facebook – something he called a “facebook f**k”. Lovely.

The site has developed it’s own self-obsessive culture. I can't remember predecessors to facebook, like Friends Reunited and MySpace having the culture of moral superiority that revolves around those who use it – as though today, not engaging in facebook is an ASBO offence. One mate of mine was told by her childhood friend: “you know, you really should sign up to facebook, so we can keep in touch properly”. Properly? What happened to emails, phone calls, texts, and even meeting up once in a while? When did facebook become the glue in modern companionship?

This kind of social networking is as virtual and unreal as the internet itself. At the risk of descending into old codgery, what happened to the good ol’ days when we actually met new people away from our desks, new experiences were sought, and friendships turned out to mean something? Surely having 10 friends that you rely on is better than having 100 who you say hi to online?

That’s not to say that these sites like facebook don’t sometime serve some great purposes. For example, the admirable students of Virginia Tech who used facebook to share information about the victims of the school shootings there so they could instantly commemorate the dead.

But even in these cases, the ties that hold these communities together is through the forging of real relationships. That takes time, effort and dedication – a concept lost on an eGeneration used to getting everything from the click of a button.

Murad Ahmed