Love Hate

Is Facebook a Friend or Foe?

As a 16 year old growing up in a small suburban neighborhood outside of Seattle, I like most other kids my age dabbled with this new online space called, Facebook. I didn’t have much interest in online media at that age other than my beloved digital camera until Facebook came along. All the sudden one-day my friends were talking about a thing called Facebook; it was a lot like MySpace but “cooler”. All the older kids were getting Facebook pages so naturally we felt it was the normal and cool thing to do to make a Facebook profile for ourselves. I wasn’t exactly jumping at the opportunity to make one but I did, my friends told me that according to their older sister’s, people who were in college and soon to be in college had to have a page because it kept everyone in touch and you could see what everyone was doing with their lives. At the time, I didn’t give it a second thought. Why wouldn’t I want to make a page so that I could get in touch by “friending” someone and posting photos I had taken with my camera? And so it began, my love hate relationship with the social media beast we know as Facebook.

It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt.

At first, I had fun posting pictures, tagging friends, clicking through and finding myself on my old friend’s hot older brother’s page and checking out all of his hot friends with my girlfriends. It felt like a group activity at first and we had a lot of fun laughing, commenting and snooping into other people’s lives. I soon found myself knowing a lot of personal details about a lot of people that I actually didn’t even know. At first, time spent on Facebook was all fun and games but I soon found myself disenchanted with this new media ecology I was participating in. About a year into becoming a seasoned Facebook “stalker” I grew bored and frustrated. A new concept of FOMO, or, fear of missing out began to formulate. Playing off of adolescent teenage insecurities, I’d get frustrated seeing pictures of my friends doing things when I couldn’t join in. Sleepovers on the weekends turned into extended Facebook stalking sessions. I use the term stalking in a non-threatening way just to be clear. As a teenage girl my curiosity about other people was at an all time high and Facebook basically opened Pandora’s box of insight which sometimes would suck me and my friends in for hours clicking through profile to profile gossiping about who’s dating who and who cheated on who and so on. Sometimes I’d get so annoyed with my friends when we were hanging out because they couldn’t step away from the computer and I’d want to go do something else. I started missing the things we used to do for fun like prank call other people or drive to the mall and shop around or meet up with some guys to see a movie and flirt with them in person. Yes, Facebook had already infiltrated flirting with guys and much of it occurred through the mediation of Facebook. Over time, I saw a gradual change in some of my friends hinging on their Facebooking habits. Some grew more gossipy from all the new juicy details they collected after a Facebook binge and some grew more anxious and worried about what other people thought of them. I’d get in little tiffs with them because I would tell them that they were being stupid for spending so much time on Facebook, to me, I really didn’t care to know so much about so many people. I really just wanted to focus on my immediate friendships and new friendships but on an individual basis. It felt like to me that people were collecting friends how fishermen catch fish, they’d cast out a big net in the form of friend requests and see how many they could collect.

It was overwhelming and boring all at the same time.

I was bored because everything about socializing was becoming impersonal. I went from having a handful of close meaningful and complex friendships to having expectations of me to keep up on my knowledge of all these other people I could give two shits about. I was overwhelmed and getting no personal satisfaction out of these so-called connections.

In my time reflecting on my first years of Facebook experience, I realize that there is so much wrong with social media platforms like Facebook that thrive on adolescence and teens using them. In HOMAGO’s discussion of Intimacy, Facebook stalking is briefly mentioned. In my experience, concepts like controlled casualness and the hyper personal effect of social media have manifested in such a way that young people’s ideas of real intimacy and friendship is evolving. These effects have given birth to weird new media functions like Facebook stalking. In my opinion, this evolution will do much more harm than good for future generations. Often, we think of the social media world as opening new doors for communication and alternative social worlds. Facebook started out as a new social world in its beginnings, however, it’s now become a scapegoat or authenticity filter for those who participate in it. For example, when I first visited WSU during my junior year of high school almost 10 years ago my girlfriends and I went to a party some of our previous upperclassman were hosting. I had developed a huge crush on one of their new college friends through my time spent Facebook stalking him. I knew so much about him and almost like I knew him, we had mutual friends. The problem is that this did not translate over to our face-to-face contact. I thought he seemed so nice and cute but when we met and hung out a little, I was very disappointed. My let down came when I realized he was a, “man slut” and kind of an asshole. I realized I had developed this idea in my head of who he was based on my perception of his projected online self. I was smart enough to realize my mistake and learned from it. I chose to be more aware and skeptical of social media unlike many others who in my opinion don’t learn this lesson.

The idea of high expectations relating to Intimacy in HOMAGO seems to be at the root of most of these issues I experienced with Facebook. Already a natural aspect of relationships, we all have varying degrees of expectations from the relationships we hold. Expectations of trust, honesty, reliability and transparency are essential to upholding human bonds, all of which I hold in high regards. The realm of Facebook extends these expectations to a whole other platform of relationships, one that is not as easily defined as a face-to-face real time fostered relationship. After my let down of the WSU boy, I started dating my high school sweetheart. He was shy, awkward and nervous around any girl but after about a year of dating I insisted he get a Facebook page because I felt he should be connected to me and everyone else around him in the same way that everyone else was. He really didn’t want it but I made it for him anyways. Overtime, despite my own awareness of the pitfalls of Facebook and effort at not letting Facebook shape my relational expectations I would pester Dillon to write something on my wall like a surprise “I love you” or change his profile picture to a picture of me and him. I thought he should be doing things and holding him to this standard because other guys were doing it for their girlfriends. I was internally conflicted however because deep down I knew that just wasn’t him but I felt entitled to these same public expressions of love simply because we had pages and Facebook maintenance was essential in my teenage mind. Looking back at this ridiculousness I can see how strongly of a change social platforms like Facebook are having on teens and adolescence. It’s just not enough for young people to satisfy their expectations of one another in real time anymore. I’d get so mad at Dillon for not showing me Facebook affection and we’d get in arguments, my feelings would be hurt and my insecurity flourished. At the end of the day, my personal experiences with Facebook revealed to me just how significantly social media was reshaping my old ideas of friendships and relationships into strange new fabricated ideas how things should be.

Shelby Kobs

Communications major at UCSD