Big Brother isn’t watching…but Facebook is

Have you updated your Facebook status today? Or perhaps uploaded some pictures whilst spending a few moments to become a fan of Roast Dinners or Sleeping?

If so, you are not alone, in fact you are actually in the middle of an expanding mob of cyber-based networking. In April 2009, Facebook recorded over 200 million active users on their website, uploading around 850 million photographs each month, and collectively managing to spend 3.5 billion minutes per day procrastinating, stalking, fine tuning their profile or attending to important matters such as finding out which Skins Character they can most relate to through a handful of simple questions.

It will be interesting to see how the Government is going to use this information to sniff out terror suspects, as so far I have yet to see a profile which lists “Reading, Skiing and Planting bombs amongst the unsuspecting British public” in their Hobbies and Interests section. However, this is a serious consideration currently going through Parliament. The BBC News recently stated: “ Tens of millions of people use sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace to chat with friends. The Home Office said it was needed to tackle crime gangs and terrorists who might use the sites but say they have no interest in the content of discussions – just who people have been talking to.”

I am not going to insult your intelligence by pointing out the similarities between the proposed scheme and Orwell’s dystopian police state in Nineteen Eighty Four. Indeed, there has already been much inflamed debate surrounding the potentially invasive nature of social networking, particularly with stories of employers doing background checks on potential workforce candidates through looking at their Facebook, MySpace or Bebo profiles.

But perhaps the issue here isn’t the fact that the Government wants to have our details, but that we feel a need to declare them en masse on social networking sites. What is it about Facebook that makes us upload new pictures and change our status?

Yes, there is the argument that social networking sites help people to stay in touch, but there are so many other ways to do this, via phone, email, or catching up with friends in person. Besides, what is so wrong about going to a foreign country and not being able to get Facebook alerts on your mobile or not being able to upload photos of the countries you have been to?

My experience of being on Facebook in South Africa, made me feel, well, like I was sitting at home in the East Midlands and to be honest, it wasn’t really the highlight of my trip to the Southern Hemisphere.

Protests, charitable causes and parties and now a vital blood line of social networking sites also survived just fine before we could make a Facebook event about them. Thus, to a large extent the question of ‘why we Facebook’ is seemingly unanswerable.

However, perhaps an interesting response to this topic is from a fourteen year old boy who I met at a family gathering during the Easter break. After asking me my name he promptly asked how many friends I had on Facebook, to which he proudly continued that he had almost 1,500 friends stating that at his school “the competition between the boys to have the most friends on Facebook is like who has the biggest cock-the more friends you have the more of a man you are.” Although a rather funny concept, perhaps he does have a point.

The more online friends a person has, the more photos a person has been tagged in and the more events a person clicks to show their attendance, does seem to hold weight in the world of Facebook. This arguably boils down to the idea that these factors hold some type of value in modern life, and in turn validate our reality. Except that surely Facebook can’t validate our reality, or is the point more that we let it do so through making it part of our day to day lifestyle?

The realms of social networking sites are seemingly limitless. Parties and nightclubs without people posing for their next album of Facebook photos have become somewhat extinct, whilst status updates increasingly cover the hour by hour movements and feelings of people’s lives. This amalgamation of digital cataloguing seems to lead to the inevitable question of when did the recording and personal broadcasting of life become preferable to simply living life?

Last Monday I decided to delete my Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. And do you know what? So far I am still alive and have not been socially ostracised by my friends. In an age where American satellites have the power to detect the text of a newspaper that a person is reading in their living room if their curtains are open, perhaps there is actually greater worth in the ignorance of not knowing that someone in your network is having pizza for dinner, hasn’t finished their essay or whatever else they choose to disclose in their status update. Although written almost seventy years ago, the words of Russian novelist Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead seem to capture the problem of the modern zeitgeist most effectively:

“It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”