Neither The Oxford English nor The Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary has a definition for the verb to facebook. Dictionary.com, my reliable on-line source for definition finding, offered “a school yearbook” as a noun definition and then proceeded to define both face and book separately. It was not until I reached into the far corners of Internet word-defining – the website Urbandictionary.com – that I found a sufficient representation of the verb:
Facebook - verb; It can be used in any tense, referring to the action one does when one uses the facebook. Examples:
1) Aaah! I need to facebook!
2) Becky, have you facebooked lately?
3) I’ve been facebooking for the past three hours.
The facebook.com, which seems all but unknown to anyone older than thirty, took over the world of Internet interaction in 2004. That fall, a group of Harvard sophomores, headed by now millionaire Mark Zuckerberg, engineered a website that allowed people from different schools to make personal profiles, send each other messages, and find common interests. Beginning only with Harvard, the website mushroomed during the 2004 academic year to include schools all over the country, from Southern Methodist University in Houston, Texas to Erskine College in Athens, Georgia, and, clearly, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. It was all so innocent: taking advantage of the world’s largest communications medium – the World Wide Web – to keep in-touch with far away friends, find out what’s happening on your own campus, and make new friends, by, gasp, friending another person: requesting their “friendship” with the click of a button. Once friended, people could view each other’s profiles, post on each other’s walls, and clearly enjoy all the social benefits of true friendship. Now its own verb, the facebook and facebooking are quickly making a case for all campus life to be confined to a computer lab.
Recently, I was in a room with three anonymous girls who exemplified the social ramifications that facebook.com has had on the future of America.
“No, I mean, she seems totalllly cool!” says girl 1.
“Really? Yeah I think so too. I mean she’s in my soc. class and everyone who takes soc. is kinda cool you know?” Says girl 2, who had met the girl in sociology class and thought she might be cool.
“Well…let’s facebook her.” Says girl 3. The other two agree and all three squeeze into one desk chair to research this poor girl’s social status on the facebook.
“Uhh, she’s only got 44 wall posts.” The room goes silent. Apparently 44 posts is nowhere near the norm and suddenly all three girls are doubting this new girl’s coolness.
“That’s not possible,” says a shocked girl 2.
“Whaaatever, she’s definitely cute though.” girl 3 has clicked just below the picture in the upper-left corner of this girl’s profile, where the girl herself or any of her friends can post pictures of her, viewable to the public. For the next twenty minutes, all three of the girls busy themselves with a comprehensive scan of 122 photos of this other girl. I can’t help but snicker and shake my head from behind the copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet I’m reading for class.
The original facebook page was fairly basic. A soft blue and white webpage with a photo in the upper left corner and one’s basic information to the right of the picture; this included political views, birthday, relationship status, and sexual preference. Below this section were one’s interests, ranging from favorite quotes to favorite movies. Below this was the message wall, where friends can chat in public. On the left side of the page, below the picture, there was the list of groups one had joined: these included Lion King and Beyond! – a group dedicated to the Disney movie, or Cheese is weird but so good – a group that bonded over an intense love for cheese. Of course dominating the page is the list of the person’s friends: first a total number, then a list of schools where one has the most friends and so on.
As the website’s members and popularity have grown so have the ridiculously extensive elements of the site. Now, you can constantly update your “status” by writing how you feel each day and having it show up on your page. You can give gifts to each other in the form of digital icons. And perhaps most annoying, each person’s News Feed announces everything that one’s friends have done recently, from adding new photos to posting on walls.
The idea is a common ground to exchange information and create relationships; the reality is an addictive site that undermines this very idea. While I admit to frequent use of the website to talk to friends or browse through photos, it keeps me in my room rather than outside meeting or hanging out with the people that I’m looking at on-line. It sounds creepy and in a way it is. However, the unprecedented use of the site by college, and since 2005, high school students –there are currently over 18 million subscribers worldwide – has turned it into a socially accepted and encouraged norm.
Like the three girls I encountered, people measure their social lives by the facebook. It has become a competition to amass friends and when someone is found with a particularly large number, they are awed and revered. In addition, people’s pictures come to represent them entirely. A photo of a drunken guy puking in the road gives someone a first impression who, otherwise, might have had a completely different perception of the guy had they met in person.
This newest product of the WWW generation, of which I am one, is not only making us lazier, but more introverted, and dependant on the web for social interaction. While blogs and instant messages are simply faster and more convenient ways for people to publish writing or talk to each other –along the same lines as cell phones replacing pay phones and even home phones – the facebook is attempting to revamp basic social concepts that need not be changed: supplanting the age-old process of physically meeting someone with an impersonal, electronic handshake.
In a recent interview with Newsweek, CEO Zuckerberg defended his creation against critics that derided it for moving life too quickly to the web.
“We don’t view the site as an online community,” said Zuckerberg. “We bill it as a directory that is reinforcing a physical community.”
My question to Mr. Zuckerberg, whose site is clearly shifting people into on-line existence: Why not live socially in a physical realm instead of recording, defining and, ultimately, degrading life on-line?
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