What does it Matter if it’s Not “Facebook Official?”

Think back ten years: imagine you are standing in line at the store when suddenly you overhear the woman in front of you say, “he wrote on my wall” and “he keeps poking me.” Undoubtedly these phrases would have seemed a bit unusual, maybe even crude, in the past. However, since the launching of Facebook.com in 2004, such expressions quickly became a part of our everyday vocabulary. With more than 800 million users worldwide (according to facebook’s statistics page) it is safe to say Facebook has taken control of our lives, and moreover, the way we handle our affairs. Images, thoughts, and even relationships can somehow seem meaningless unless they are shared on the social network.

A picture once served the purpose of capturing a specific moment and making it last for a lifetime. This memory could then be revisited anytime the picture was pulled out of an old dusty box or flipped through in an album. Much like the above phrases, the term “album” rarely refers to a physical picture book anymore. Compiling a photo album used to be a time consuming activity, but now, albums with up to 200 pictures can be accumulated within minutes. Though cameras are still capturing moments, one could argue the frequency of this in turn, makes the images less special. Yet, according to facebook’s statistics page, clearly with an average of 250 million photos uploaded daily, we see no function for pictures unless they are posted for the world to see. Perhaps scarier than the need to upload photos is the need to legitimize our own thoughts via “the status.”
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg revealed in a Q&A with Federated Media’s John Battelle, that statuses are updated about 45 million times a day. Cleverly articulated, intellectual or useful information announced on Facebook is one thing; it is the emotional status updaters that should probably pick up the phone and direct their feelings elsewhere. But there is something even worse than the emotional Facebooker, and that is the excessive status updater. This is the person who could not possibly spend more than one hour of their day offline, and we know this because even in the middle of the night they inform the public they cannot sleep.

Statuses took on a whole new popularity when the tagging and location settings were introduced; now, in addition to keeping track of your own moves, you can track your friends’ moves as well.

Since I am on the subject, let’s discuss friends. To provide a better understanding I typed “define: friend” into the Google search bar and the first definition read, “Verb: Add (someone) to a list of contacts associated with a social networking website.” So like writing on walls, poking and albums, we have redefined yet another word in our vocabulary. We have also deemed that one cannot be a true friend unless they appear in that list of contacts. Similar to a real friend, one cannot be in a real relationship without making it “Facebook official” first. Nothing says commitment like a relationship request; however it seems a tad binding to have it in print. Luckily, what goes up can always come down which is perfectly displayed by those who change their relationship status as much as their regular one.

While I can sit here and judge a major segment of the world’s population, I myself am guilty of all of the above, contributing to the more than 800 million users on Facebook. I have 1098 photos, plenty of statuses, 496 “friends” and throughout the entire process of writing this article a Facebook tab permanently sat open in my browser. Whether we like it or not, we now live in a cyber society. Do I agree with it? No. Am I going to alienate myself from a whole new way of communicating to prove a point? …Not a chance.