If Facebook is business for Mark Zuckerberg, what is Facebook for you?

Forbes lately released its list of world’s richest people in 2015 and again the technology gurus have topped the list. Bill Gates, the owner of Microsoft is at the top for the second consecutive year. Also for the first time we have Mark Zuckerberg make it to the top 20 with a net worth of $33.4 billion. Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world’s youngest billionaires. Also on 4th February 2016 Facebook celebrated its 12th birthday. In 2009, Mezrich included Mark in his list of accidental billionaires and maybe rightly did so. To quote Scott Foundas (2010), “Like so many historic achievements in arts, letters and commerce, Facebook was born of a romantic rejection.”

I am sure that Facebook as a social networking site needs not much explanation, especially if I don’t see it beyond what Mark intended of it, even though accidental and what he directs it to, in fact strategically. However, if I want to see what it means for me, I may have a different explanation for Facebook. What is it on Facebook that makes you and me a regular and indulgent user. Calling Facebook a mere social networking site would then be a gross underestimation. According to Time magazine, ‘The social network created by Mark connected almost every tenth person on the planet’, also, ‘Today, Facebook is the third largest country in the world that knows about its citizens as much as no government on the planet does.’

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From the rituals of socializing to definition of privacy and security, Facebook seems to have created novel ways of doing it and in the most gentle manner possible. Usually, we are scared of new things, but who is scared of Facebook? Where most of the time you are seeing your own faces, or probably the faces you want to be. In March 2010, Facebook.com surpassed Google as the most visited webpage in the United States. It has a lot more than one Billion users and roughly 250 million people log on everyday and they spend more than a combined 11 billion hours on Facebook every month. However, Facebook is not limited to just keeping connected with friends and family, there are numerous interest groups and fan pages that help to rally the people together. Not just that, Facebook is also a huge database of our personal profiles that once upon a time was meant to be a hushed affair.

Was Facebook an accident or a dark expression of human desire?

If stories are to believe, it all started with a romantic rejection of Mark Zuckerberg, a popularly called ‘geek’, ‘nerd’ or ‘prodigy in computer programming’, as a student at Harvard. In order to take revenge on that sleepless night of rejection, he programmed Facemash, where faces of two girls were pitched against each other to vote for the hottest. One of those girls was of course his ex girlfriend who rejected him. The game became extremely viral within Harvard and was certainly followed by strict actions against Mark. However, the idea that an activity of judging other faces and knowing them and likes could become a platform for social interaction within a community, stayed on. In 2004, few friends approached Mark to program a social dating site for students at Harvard and which became a success. This digital platform for interaction, then spread from within the elite universities to the public realm very soon.

Certainly the journey of Facebook faced many challenges and opposition, but Mark made sure that it continues to grow as the stakes of the company increased. We then witnessed a massive migration of people from the real to the virtual world. With Facebook, Twitter, etc., we have become the stars of our own reality show as we communicate in the real time, overcoming all regional, time zone, and now cultural separation. As Scott Fondas explains in Revenge of the Nerd (2010), it is a reality show where our popularity is measured on the count of friends and followers, just like box office returns. Friends who are tuned to our every banal thought and act.

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Most importantly, Facebook is free. However, while Facebook helps us to do many things relatively for no cost, we also help Facebook make money. Facebook had a turnover of $7.87 billion and net income of $1.5 billion in 2013. The basic earnings of Facebook, about 85% comes from contextual ads on the pages of social network. The amount of time we spend on the site is converted into advertising revenues. The rest 15% is derived from the goods we purchase through the Facebook payment system. You must be wondering what exactly do we purchase. Well, we do not purchase real goods, but virtual goods like seeds, fruits and vegetables in the popular game Farmville developed by Zinga. Although the whole idea of virtual goods sounds frivolous, it is a serious business. The company estimates that in 2010 the global market turnover of virtual goods reached $7 billion, and by 2014 it rose to $15 billion. In between Facebook also started testing paid private messaging. Soon it strategically acquired other startup ventures like Instagram, Oculus Rift, WhatsApp etc.

Facebook as a social fact

Richard M. Billow (2012) understood Facebook as an idea and reality beyond just a social networking site. This was in the study with his own psychotherapy group. He saw Facebook as what Durkhiem (1982) would call a social fact, a social phenomenon that is generalized, external and coercive. He says, as a social fact, Facebook informed and organized broad and diverse areas of the group, introduced new idioms, altered boundaries of time and location, reduced confidentiality and abrogating anonymity. Here, one can either submit to it or rebel against Facebook’s social impact or surrender creatively and retain faith in the co users. So how exactly did Facebook change our ways, just to mention a few-:

> Facebook as our right to free speech

In this hyperconnected digital world like Facebook and Twitter, which is apparently a more equally accessible realm of expression and people are more empowered than before. Hence ideas are also travelling bottom up while breaking most hierarchies. This has also resulted in Facebook getting banned in many countries and the higher government authorities being cautious and sensitive to ideas spread through these social networking sites.

> Personal rituals of unfriending transformed to public act

Social Networking sites are playing an important role in framing the boundaries and association between individuals and groups, personal and public life. The rising act of unfriending demonstrates how an otherwise personal ritual has become a public act. Earlier, in order to block a person, we used to either delete their e-mails, threw away memory pictures or simply ignored. In 2010, Oxford English Dictionary named ‘unfriend’ the word of the year. It is a verb that means to remove someone from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking site. This reflects the pervasive impact of Facebook on not just our acts and language, but also in the way we organize our lives.

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> Facebook as a digital mob

One of the biggest influences of Facebook and other SNS have been on mobilizing political action, especially as the world becomes a more connected sphere. One early evidence of this is the 2008 presidential election, where Barack Obama used social media to facilitate grassroots support movement for elections. Sociologist John Ratliff, calls it the ‘netroot’, where the implications of online social networking on political process can be extremely complicated. Facebook and Twitter have almost overnight become the world’s collective soap boxes, petition sheets and discussion halls. These movements have certainly helped topple many despots in Tunisia, Egypt and Lybia and influenced movements in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Spain and Israel, India, Britain, the US and elsewhere. Consequently, Facebook is more or less banned in Burma, Cuba, Iran and North Korea among others.

> Facebook- a witness to our Rites of Passage

It is possible that our own close family members might not know about our relationships, but our Facebook friends and Facebook managers would certainly know. If it is our friend’s birthday, Facebook reminds us to wish and celebrate. Everybody participates virtually in the event even if not in person and this is followed by pictures posted so that no one misses anything. Hence, Facebook is our best journal, it also keeps us reminded about our past memories. It is also a world in itself, where we search for our long lost friends and be sure to find and meet them on Facebook, if not in reality.

> Facebook- a personal profile for public use

Facebook and other SNS have redefined the boundaries of private and public. For the first time, private information is made available in public and that too voluntarily. So far infringement on privacy meant acquiring someone elses private information, but now since such information is widely available, infringement on privacy occurs mainly when others use the private information in non consensual and unintended ways. Researchers show that Facebook profiles are mainly created for public consumption treated with confusing privacy settings. Hence, SNS are now redefining the boundaries of private and public.

> Facebook- a myth of unity?

It is a fact that many groups and individuals deal with issues of separateness, isolation and loneliness. Here, the internet serves as a medium to fulfill the apparent unity and fellowship with like minded especially among distanced people. Facebook’s usage as an ongoing group for dialogue can be appreciated as filling some sort of void in not just communication but also in mental oneness with others. No wonder Facebook is called a world or nation in itself.

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We are not sure if Facebook is exactly a social fact as influential as Durkhiem meant it to be. However, Facebook has certainly influenced our identities and group behavior as an external force that informs, organizes broad institutions and practices in religion, aesthetics, politics, etc. Of course Facebook or SNS alone could not cause the Arab Spring or any other major socially significant event. Social media may help people organize, but cannot expect people to put themselves at risk. As our ideas and voices get more public space, they also undergo strict public scrutiny. Its an incendiary combination here, especially when we remember the answer that Obama gave in 2009 to a student who inquired about how to become a president. The President very rightly told the student to be careful about what he puts on Facebook.

Coming to the question of what is Facebook for Mark and what it means to each one of us, one can say that the intention behind the basic idea of Facebook that started as a dark humor and then moved to networking and so on. However, Mark is certainly a prodigy, no doubt, however, what makes him and his team a real prodigy is probably the idea that they could realize how other humans are no different from them. They saw the desire to connect and express in real time without spatial boundaries as common to all and realized that one could fill that empty space with a new filler called Facebook. Certainly he is making money out of our desire to connect. Yet, besides a network to connect and fellowship, Facebook for a lot of us is a journal, it is our freedom of speech, a place to perfect our face, it constructs our views, is a tool for social mobilization and maybe a myth of unity.