Over the past few months, I have increasingly begun to worry that Facebook is not merely a benign way to connect with friends, but in fact troubling evidence of significant societal changes in our attitudes about social interaction, privacy, and more.  When I say Facebook, of course, I also mean social networking websites in general, but Facebook has emerged as the clear leader in the field and now sets the tone around which discussion of the impact of online social networks is based, and my experience with social networking websites is limited to Facebook, so it is what I refer to.

It is undeniable that Facebook offers many benefits in a time in which the network is ubiquituous, devices are always on, and people are always connected.  The benefits can mainly be categorized as features that allow us to maintain a larger social circle than we would otherwise be able to.  I have 460 Facebook friends, and probably at least 450 are people I remember, know how I know, and can put a name and face to.  I would say that having anywhere from 350 to 600 Facebook friends is about normal for most college kids I know–some high school friends and some college ones. Many of these people are people I have not interacted with much in a year, two, or more, and would probably have forgotten had I not occasionally seen their name on my Facebook newsfeed.  Sociological research indicates that the human brain is naturally limited to about 150 contacts, but this is a consequence of our ability to have only that many relationships, not our ability to remember only that many people.

My first issue with Facebook is that it favors breadth over depth in social relationships, and this leads to a reduction in quality in our relationships.  I would not argue that by having hundreds of Facebok friends we are necessarily cheapening our relationships with our true friends, but it certainly introduces a lot of noise that we have to filter out to get to what really matters.  Also, any time we spend communicating with friends online, whether it be realtime or not, is time that could be spent having real interaction with our friends, in a physical setting, which is surely much more healthy and naturally satisfying.  Online interaction tends to be much more fragmented and have much less meaningful discussion.

One example of the cheapening of real social interaction that I was reminded of today is the birthday wishes users commonly post on friends’ walls.  While there is nothing wrong with posting such a message, I think these posts are largely meaningless and I refrain from making them.  You have a list of people who have a birthday today, so you don”t have to actually remember your friend’s birthday, and it takes only seconds to post a short message on their wall.  If I want to say happy birthday in a meaningful way, I tell them personally (as many people do in addition, of course).  If they are someone who I wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell personally, then either they are someone who is a good enough friend that I would call to wish a happy birthday, or, frankly, they are someone who I don’t need to be wishing happy birthday to.

There is a lot of noise, but I think we still pretty effectively filter it out to get down to the important things.  However, it is still a major waste of time, and that is my second major issue with Facebook.  Of course, people, myself included, who spend too much time on Facebook (the sort of people who always have Facebook open in a tab), have none but themselves to blame for any wasted time.  It’s just such a perfect time sink, because it plays into our natural human desire to connect with people, but, that connection, as I said, can be somewhat superficial, and certainly Facebook rarely results in any productive output.  (Though I must say that Facebook groups and events are an amazing effective way of mobilizing committed groups of people when you have such a large pool to draw from.)  We should all consider how much we use Facebook, and if it seems that we spend an amount of time on it disproportionate to the real benefits we derive from it, we should limit our usage.  It seems to me that the most effective usage pattern is to check Facebook maybe once or twice a day, respond to messages and wall posts, and then sign off.

Perhaps the most troubling impact of Facebook is that it fosters a disregard for privacy.  I think we have seen a remarkably rapid change, mainly generational, in societal attitudes about privacy due to the large proportion of high school and college-aged kids who seem to put their entire lives on facebook.  Think about it: if you had told someone even just ten years ago that many people would be posting frequent status updates about their lives and nearly every photo they take for every one of their hundreds of “friends” on Facebook to see, I think that they’d have thought you were describing some far off future.   This is not even to mention the significant minority who make their profiles available to the thousands of people in their college network, or even in their entire geographical network.

Most people have recognized for a while that it is highly inadvisable to make their information, most importantly photos, viewable by anyone who they are not explicity friends with.  Kids are worried about stalkers, parents about child predators.  But I think by focusing on this we are overlooking the fact that there is something wrong with even just making all your photos public to your friends.  Likewise, the mere existence of a “Wall” on which your friends can write and their messages can and will be viewed by any of your other friends seems fundamentally wrong to me.  There is no reason one wouldn’t send most wall posts as private messages using that feature on Facebook, and yet people don’t.  It’s as if there’s peer pressure to make everything public, or that by making a message public you want people to be privy to all your mundane or not-so-mundane personal communications.  Doesn’t anyone value privacy any more?  We are living in an orgy of publicness, and I think we are taking the natural human tendency to tell people about ourselves too far.  It’s better to keep some parts of ourselves private.  At the moment I can’t think of a good way to expand on this sentiment, but it’s something that I feel strongly.

Lastly, Facebook is bad because it is a proprietary walled garden.  You can’t generally access your profile information, photos, or statuses from outside of Facebook.  This stifles competition and innovation when one company, as Facebook does, controls a virtual monopoly on the social network market in some demographic markets.  Facebook is the only service that everyone is on in many places in the U.S.  Many people still have MySpace profiles, and in some areas of the country, MySpace is still more dominant, but Facebook is basically ubiquitous among young people right now.

As a consequence of the walled garden, for example, it is, as far as I am aware, impossible to backup your content on Facebook in compliance with the terms of use, which are also subject to change at any time.  Facebook also owns the copyright to much of the content published on it.  This whole arrangement could lead to a very troublesome situation in the future.  If people, as they perhaps already do, come to trust a private company to control all of their social graph and content, then it could be very bad when, in the future, more important things start being digitized within the context of social networks.  It would be much preferable if everyone could host their own profile and content on their on website or on a provider of their choice, and the people in their social graph could be on any service, since there would be a universal standard.  A user’s social home page could then pull in updates from friends on multiple servers.  In the microblogging arena, this sort of thing already exists, with laconi.ca being an open-source implementation that can pull in status updates hosted on another server; the proprietary Twitter, though, is and will remain the monopoly in microblogging because users aren’t technical enough and don’t care enough, and the same will go for Facebook.

So, in summary, Facebook has undeniable benefits, but I believe that the negative effects outweigh them, and we should really think about limiting our Facebook usage.

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