Facebook Fever

I vividly remember the first time I ever heard about facebook. I was having coffee with a friend in a busy London coffee shop when she casually mentioned to me that she wanted to go online and check her "wall". Soon she lapsed into an enthusiastic discussion of how she and her friends were having a "poke war" to see who could "poke" back the most without getting tired. She also kept mentioning wall posts and how reading them was a wonderful way of knowing the latest updates in people's lives. I stared back in bewildered confusion, completely oblivious to all these strange foreign terms she was bombarding me with! It all sounded so alien and like complete gibberish to me. I wondered how in the world could you POKE someone ONLINE, and how in the world could you WRITE on a WALL!!!! I did not understand the concept nor did I get what all the fuss was about. Why people were so excited about something as common as a personal profile with a measly friend list attached to it was beyond me! What was the big deal?

Little did I know that soon, I would become a devoted facebook junkie myself. Soon afterwards, I created a facebook profile and I never looked back. I was caught up in a whirlwind of "pokes", personal messages, "applications" and "wall" posts. Such terms which sounded so peculiar to me before became completely normal and standardized.

Today, it's almost bizarre to find an avid internet user who has never heard of facebook. Facebook profiles are even created by politicians who use them to increase followers and boost their popularity! Celebrities use them to widen their fan base. Even teachers use them to connect with their students. Facebook users have quickly created their own private world, complete with their own slang terminology, which might sound ridiculous outside the scope of this website.

Would you believe that 4 short years ago facebook did not exist? It started in 2004, as a University project by a 20 year old Harvard sophomore student, which later on expanded to become open to the public! Soon, facebook fever started sweeping the world, moving outside the United States onto international grounds and spreading. Today, one hundred and ten million active people from hundreds of countries around the world use facebook daily, as a main means of interaction and communication.

Which brings us to the essential question; what does this level of popularity indicate? Are there any negative sides to the world being so absorbed in a technological phenomenon? Let's face reality, it would certainly be much easier and hassle-free to go on facebook and send mass personal messages or multiple wall posts, rather than go through the hassle of picking up the phone and going through a long list of calls. You might as well skip through the polite chitchat, hop through the obligatory small talk, jump over the formal hellos and goodbyes and click on straight to the point, right?

For instance, if you were to invite a group of friend over for a gathering, you could send 20 personal messages with one click that read "we are throwing a surprise birthday party for Lana at my place Tuesday at 8". Or simply send a message that says "I need to borrow your notes tomorrow" instead of going through the whole process of actually calling and asking.

I like to think of it as an infinite yet limited sea of interaction. Infinite in the sense that there are no limits to the number of people you can contact with a few simple clicks. Endless possibilities in the number of people you might reestablish lost ties with in this sea of millions. No boundaries in the sense that an hour a day spent on facebook could enable you catch up with 15 or 20 friends, in a way that a telephone never could.

Yet, despite all these endless possibilities, being on facebook keeps us limited in ways beyond our imagination. We are becoming limited in the sense that we are losing the principles of basic human contact such as favoring typed words over the art of conversations. We are becoming limited, in the way that we might forget the joy of simple pleasures like going over to a newlywed's house for coffee to see her wedding and honeymoon picture albums. Why bother when you find her picture album posted on facebook a few days later. We are confined in the sense that we are keeping in contact with tens of hundreds of friends, yet we rarely hear their voices or see their faces…

Though we are in touch, we are a thousand miles apart. It was disheartening to me to realize that I am in "constant contact" with a friend whom I have not seen for almost two years! It is daunting for me to think that simple acts like meaningless small talks of catching up or huge picture albums might become rare occasions in the future. We, as human beings, are bound within the confines of our own genius creations. So advanced are we, that we are destroying the bridges we have spent years building.