Society

I Finally Realized that Facebook has Changed the World

Clayton Trutor

At 27, I’m the youngest person I know without a Facebook account. I make this claim after a month’s worth of low-intensity research into the matter. Since the site’s launch in 2004, virtually all of my friends have made reference to their activities on Facebook. I broadened my narrow survey sample by strolling through computer labs at several universities and public libraries in the Boston area. When I asked the numerous strangers I saw logged into the site to show me how Facebook works, every one of them sat me down for a lesson. These predominately youthful strangers showed me the ins and outs of their personal accounts: pictures, instant messages, “pokes” from their hundreds of friends, and a message board “wall” visible to anyone with full access to their page. New Englanders, I concluded, are both friendly and unfamiliar with stranger danger. I finished up my research by typing in the names of over 200 acquaintances that live outside of New England into Google. I came across a Facebook page for every one of them.

While my group of acquaintances far from represents the entire swath of American youth, my experiments with them demonstrate the extent of Facebook’s reach. Demographically speaking, they suggest that the lion’s share of the 35 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 27 expend a portion of their youthful exuberance on social networking websites. This might be obvious to most people familiar with Facebook, but I was far enough out of the loop culturally that this came as a surprise.

Change occurs quickly on the web, but even at the time of Facebook’s launch five years ago, many of the dynamics of the web seemed well established. The Internet consisted of a proliferation of helpful websites which offered a proliferation of efficient services and time-killing amusements. The idea that a site which is not a search engine could become a one-stop communication and entertainment center may have surprised many people in 2004. Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, the creators of Facebook, launched the site as a means of networking with their undergraduate peers at Harvard. The site soon expanded to other elite East Coast universities before broadening its potential membership to anyone with a university email address. By autumn 2006, anyone with an email address and the willingness to describe themselves as being at least thirteen years old could join.

Facebook has emerged as an electronic companion to young adulthood. Two and a half years after its creation, the now Silicon Valley based corporation invited the entire public into its social network. The numbers suggest that my elders adopted Facebook just as quickly as college students did a few years ago. The opening of the Facebook floodgates brought millions of adolescents into the fold, but the appeal of the site to older adults surprised even Facebook’s most exuberant evangelists. In the past year, eleven million adults between the ages of 30 and 50 created Facebook accounts. This surge among older adults has lead privacy advocates, most notably the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), to intensify their campaigns to prevent Facebook from serving as a surveillance tool for either governmental or corporate entities. The experiences of this older wave of Facebookees do not correspond directly to the fears of groups’ like EPIC that increased Facebook usage by the workforce will lead to greater workplace surveillance. Most new members, whether young or old, sign up without any prompting from management. Like their younger counterparts, older adults sign up for a wide range of reasons. Some of them join up because it’s latest trend around the water cooler. Others desire to reconnect with old friends or cement their connections with new ones. Some people join because they are simply curious about the latest trend on the web. In every case, Facebook provides people with an outlet for expressing their ideas or fulfilling narcissistic impulses. I assume most people’s motivations for getting involved with Facebook combine a little of each.

Facebook is one of many prominent sites leading the web 2.0 charge. While other juggernauts like You Tube, Wikipedia, and Twitter have further democratized the creation of web content, Facebook constitutes the most significant transformation of internet activity. It reconfigures the nature of human sociability. Facebook does directly what the web has hinted at all along: it enables people to socialize by themselves. Earlier manifestations of web sociability enable individuals to make discreet connections with strangers or intimates. Message boards, chat rooms, and fan sites allowed people to create personas predicated on anonymity, personas driven primarily by the written word. Email, instant messenger, and, later, Skype, helped people make virtual connections to friends and family. These platforms employ primarily the written word or audio technology, allowing people to remain connected to other people with whom they were already in close contact.

By proclaiming the seminal importance of Facebook, I seem to be underestimating the impact of the web on business. The economic impact of the web has proven tremendous, particularly as people have become more comfortable typing in their credit card numbers to an increasing array of sites. The social impact of this economic transformation remains debatable. The past decade witnessed a large shift in commerce to the internet, yet its overall impact on the social life of the marketplace seems surprisingly minimal. E-commerce merely emphasizes the transition of shopping from downtowns to the suburban periphery. In the case of internet shopping, the periphery moves from a mall to one’s own home. Furthermore, much of the business on the internet remains particular to the internet, a virtual circulation of virtual goods which facilitate one’s use of the internet. While e-commerce has certainly changed both corporate America and small business, these changes seem to improve people’s access to consumer goods rather than transforming the nature of trade. Corporate America continues to struggle in its efforts to integrate the web into its business model. At best, the web has facilitated their billing services and provided customers with websites which serve as a combination view book/catalog for browsing. Even the most purportedly revolutionary internet merchants mimic preexisting business models. EBay provides consumers with a super-duper flea market. Amazon.com remains a less-discriminating version of the Sears catalog which lacks the practical hygienic uses of its predecessor. The pre-existing industries which have succeeded at unprecedented levels on line all deal in taboos. They make use of the web’s anonymity to sell their wares.

Compared to the aforementioned uses of the internet, Facebook offers a profoundly different form of human connection. It transforms web sociability into a multi-media adventure played out among one’s friends, family, and acquaintances. Facebook renders friendship a conspicuously quantifiable commodity. The efforts of users to acquire a large number of friends, regardless of their level of intimacy with the people, comes off like a contemporary version of the Puritan notion of visible sainthood. The size of one’s friends’ list offers concrete evidence of a person’s virtue and desirability.

Facebook gives people the opportunity to serve as their own public relations directors. The site provides individuals with many opportunities to interact with all of their friends in a number of one-size-fits-all mediums. A Facebook user can show off lists of all his favorite films, bands, and tv shows as well as all of the variables of his personal life to the hundreds of people on his friends’ list. He can upload photos and videos of his latest get-togethers. His friends can respond to his various “status” rants on his “wall” or “poke” him and send along a virtual gift, such as an image of a beer stein. Friendship on Facebook ceases to be a unique human relationship, one created by people’s common experiences in a particular time and space. Facebook transforms friendship into a multi-media performance. It transforms the performer into a minor celebrity, which is apparently a not-so-secret desire for most people. A widely circulated news clip from fall 2008 noted that social networking had recently replaced pornography as the web’s most popular genre of website. Apparently, only people’s desire for publicity tops their desires for onanism.

Critics of Facebook point, quite reasonably, to the site’s popularity as proof of the death of personal privacy. Laying this social transformation at the feet of Facebook grants the site too much power. The history of the World Wide Web constitutes a narrative history of the decline of personal privacy. At least Facebook gives individuals greater agency in the process. On the matter of privacy, Facebook’s greatest impact has been on the reconfiguration of public and private life. Users can enjoy the comforts of domestic privacy while seeking out personal interaction in an extensive social marketplace. This cuts out the physical experience of the public encounter, enabling social beings to interact without the inconvenience of dealing with actual people. Facebook manages the process of reuniting, catching up, and remembering. Whether you see it as instant gratification or an efficient means of going home again, Facebook makes all of this available to anyone with internet access and the ability to input answers for a few simple variables.