The day my wife joined Facebook, she described the experience as a never-ending high school reunion that you don't have to actually attend. You catch a glimpse of what long-lost acquaintances have done with themselves without the risk of awkward conversation.
By design, Facebook is a many-tentacled thing. The website makes money selling ads; it's goal is to keep large numbers of people on the site for a long time. Facebook achieves this in several ways:
1. We like thinking we have lots of friends.
2. Our friends are good at keeping our attention.
3. Facebook is terribly user unfriendly.
When you first join Facebook, you search for the names of your friends. This first wave of friends is likely worthy of the meaning of the word. You send each person an invite to become one of your Facebook friends. Facebook then goes to work figuring out who your friends are. Its database takes advantage of our tendency to belong to overlapping circles of friends and begins suggesting common denominators as "people you may know". These suggestions appear every time you log in to Facebook. Every time you navigate to a new page within Facebook, the suggestions rotate to new possible friends.
There is a happy thrill to unearthing long lost friends and enemies—and of adding to your burgeoning friend count. This diabolically clever combination of technology and human nature has cultivated a Facebook etiquette that you become friends with everyone who requests your friendship. And soon the average user is up to 100 friends. In this way, there is no one you know on Facebook with whom you are not friends.
The benefit of Facebook is that it offers new ways to stay in touch with more people than ever before possible. Let's be realistic: how many of those friends are really friends?
Facebook's most prominent feature is the "news feed" which is a list of all the "status updates" of everyone in your friend network. A status update answers the question, "What are you doing right now?". Typical updates are often inane—and because the average user has 100 friends, Facebook's most prominent quality is that it is riddled with inanity.
In this way, Facebook may be redefining what it means to be "in touch". Does knowing what you had for breakfast make me a better friend? Can social networks bring people closer together? As with any other way of relating, it all depends on the quality of effort put into the relationship. "I'm eating a donut." is unlikely to strengthen the bonds of friendship stretched hundreds or thousands of miles.
Many of the self-publishing formats on the web (this blog included) are a one-way street: the publisher produces a personal message that few people care about. At least Facebook makes this self-publishing a little more relevant; your readers might actually have an interest in your message.
This leads to Facebook tenet # 1: Only "friend" people who are actually your friends. Ignore invites from everyone else.
Sure, you might bruise a few egos (this is self-publishing, after all), but clogging up your Facebook account with chaff will make the Facebook experience worse for you and for them. Look at it this way: by avoiding worthless "I'm eating a donut." updates from people you haven't talked to in a decade, you're spending more time actually staying in touch with the people you care about.
In fact, this tenet may be the most important. Facebook is rife with opportunities for distraction. Not only are friends notified within Facebook about status updates, profile updates, photo updates, etc., most users receive email notifications (though this feature can be turned off).
The site allows third-party software developers to create "applications" designed to entertain, advertise, or glean information about you. An application may be a trivia contest, a coupon, an online greeting card, etc. Relatedly, users can become "fans" of businesses that have set up commercial Facebook accounts. Every time one of your friends participates in an application or becomes a fan of a business, you will hear about it somehow, often through your "news feed" and in an email notification from Facebook. Suddenly your friends have made you a tool of the marketing gimmicks they have fallen for. Your friends force you to read ads. It's diabolical.
On Facebook, choosing your friends wisely is critical.
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