The Facebook Phenomenon

This video makes fun of a very important point concerning social networking. Anti-social behavior. Overall, I had avoided any real use of Facebook until this month. I don’t like having digital friends, I want my friends to call me so we can have a conversation and maybe even get together and spend some real time in a room talking. Facebook, to me seems to perpetuate anti-social behavior insofar that people who are friends on Facebook have the ability to hold their friends at arms-length but still feel like they have a real friendship. I finally got a Facebook account because I understand that everyone is using Facebook and I will likely need to use it in my future career.

Face book isn’t my first social networking platform. I remember the very first social networking site I got involved in. It was called Xanga. Xanga was essentially a blog sight with some limited social networking capabilities. You could subscribe to other people’s pages and they could subscribe to yours. It was simple, and easy. Then came Myspace. That’s right, I’m resurrecting the old favorite. Myspace was pretty amazing because unlike Facebook with its drab white background and limited customization options, you could completely rewrite the HTML coding to make Myspace look like well… your space. This led of course to many security issues and some layouts and customized pages were just annoying. Add to that the option to annoy every one of your friends with song streaming that automatically loaded with your page and you had a real winner of a page. I loved Myspace and when I heard about Facebook I took a look at it. It was boring and annoying to me. Like I said before, Facebook was drab and completely not my style. I resisted the Facebook flight, more and more people abandoned their Myspace for Facebook until all of my friends were gone and I just stopped using the site altogether.

There are a few reasons why I think Facebook won the social networking battle. The first was that Facebook is uniform across profiles. You can’t mess with the coding of Facebook. There are no wonky backgrounds, no rearranging the sections, and there is a significant lack of musical bombardment. Second, Myspace was very laid back. It allowed you to look around at your friend’s posts. You were not required to view every single post your friends made. You actually had to visit your friend’s page in order to see what they posted. Facebook is in your face all the time. Between the chat function, email alerts, and the little red indicators at the top of the page, Facebook demands your attention. Facebook gives you the sense that if you don’t pay attention to it all the time you’re going to miss something. It’s brilliant in the sense that Facebook has made people believe that it is important.

The third reason I think Facebook managed to stomp Myspace in the ground is because it’s all about other people and not so much about you yourself. The focus of Facebook is to friend others and spend a lot of time reading their opinions and posts. Some interesting public conversations happen on Facebook whereas they would mainly happen in private on Myspace.

I’m not entirely sure what has made Facebook a phenomenon. Yes, it has all of these features, and yes you can keep in touch with your friends but why the craze? Why the obsession with the constant drone and dribble of pointless trivialities? I feel like Facebook is doing to socialization what email did to the formal letter. Email killed the formal letter, will Facebook conquer face to face interaction almost completely?  I don’t have all the answers but I know this… I am going to go and check my Facebook.