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Imagine all your friends, lovers, workmates, bosses, and relatives past and present gathered around you in a giant room. One by one, you chat with each person - in front of everyone else. Some conversations are banal: your analysis of last week's Dancing with the Stars; complaints about your messy flatmate. Others more intimate: your deepening feelings for someone; health problems.
Photos of you cover the walls. You skiing last winter. You leery and rosy cheeked, wine in hand. You asleep and dribbling on your friend's couch. Dotted about are lists of your likes and dislikes and gimmicky games, like glib comparisons between you and everyone else here. And flashing in neon lights above your head, like a measure of your worth, is your audience total.
In endless parallel dimensions, everyone in the room stands at the centre of their own vast social hall.
Welcome to the world of Facebook, where everybody knows much more than your name.
Around the world, millions of people have created their own personal halls of fame on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Mutually agreed "friends" can check out each other's personal profiles, send messages, share photos and video clips. The sites offer various privacy settings to limit who sees what, but some users make their profiles universally viewable, especially Bebo-ites.
Bebo is New Zealand teenagers' favourite website, according to the latest Census At School survey. Internet use tracker Hitwise shows Bebo is the most-visited site of its kind here, closely followed by Facebook.
Anecdotally, MySpace and Facebook attract a slightly older crowd. MySpace is the pick for wannabe performers, like Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the callgirl who triggered the downfall of former New York governor Eliot Spritzer. Facebook attracts university students, white collar professionals, celebrities and politicians alike. People aged 25 up are the fastest growing Facebook demographic globally. Globally, Bebo claims 40 million members and Facebook some 67 million active members.
But the party could be over. Facebook suffered a five per cent drop in British users between December and February, according to Nielsen Online. It was the first drop recorded in Britain in 17 months. Critically, the average amount of time members spent on all three of the big networks had also fallen; in Bebo's case, by 25 per cent. Figures show a similar pattern in Australia.
American ad agency giant JWT has picked "Facebook suicide" - the voluntary shutting down of your social network profile - as a major trend for the year.
Facebook did not respond to queries about New Zealand membership, but those hooked in testify to a souring. Web analysts call it "Facebook fatigue". People are neglecting their profiles, ignoring messages, even self-terminating.
One of them is Kelly Bebich, a 34-year-old Auckland capital planner. On Wednesday night, she sent personal farewell messages to her Facebook friends and euthanased her virtual self. Bebich jumped on the Facebook juggernaut about seven months ago. She accumulated 110 Facebook friends, a respectable total, but soon found herself in awkward entanglements.
"You get into situations where you've got your friend's ex and current girlfriend both linking to you; or you're the middle friend between two friends that had a big falling out, and they can both see the other one on your friends list. It's that transparency: do they need to know you're still friends? There's no separation, no privacy. You don't know who's looking at what."
There were other hassles, familiar to Facebookers. "People you don't really know sending you friendship requests; people writing comments on your wall [personal message board on your main page] that you don't necessarily want everyone to see."
She'd been contemplating quitting for a while. "I don't really need it, it's not really adding anything to my life."
But, Facebook doesn't release you without a fight. When she clicked on "deactivate", a list of possible reasons for her departure came up. For each one she clicked, a solution appeared that would have allowed her to remain in the Facebook fold. And deactivation doesn't delete your pages, it just takes them out of circulation. Traces of all those heart-to-hearts and humiliating photos remain in Facebook's virtual holding bay.
Until last month, deactivation was the only option. But, after a run of headlines about disgruntled Facebookers' battles to get their records permanently erased, Facebook added a "delete" option to its Help page.
Manhattan business consultant Nippon Das became a mascot for the Facebook backlash after it took him two months of emailing and a legal threat to get his profile deleted last year. He took to quoting from the Eagles' song Hotel California: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
AUCKLAND PSYCHOLOGIST Nathan Gaunt, an expert in the psychology of new social technology, isn't surprised by the turning tide. Call it the "new toy" effect, he says. "People rush towards the new thing, then that's followed by disillusionment when it doesn't meet everyone's needs, or causes fatigue."
He sees it as part of a wider backlash against the 24/7 connectedness compelled by modern technology.
"People used to say you're looking for your 15 minutes of fame. Now you're looking for your 15 minutes of anonymity."
Beyond their potential for time-wasting, sites like Facebook blur boundaries between the private and public, personal and worklife, and the different personae or roles we play in different relationships (who's talking now - the saucy, worldly you? The responsible employee you? The wise counsellor you?)
The false, instant intimacy of social networking, like texting, encourages people to disclose more than they would in person. And, with the potential for misinterpretation, virtual interactions can confuse and complicate real relationships.
Wellington writer Helen (not her real name) and her new boyfriend got together - and almost broke up - in full view of their respective Facebook circles.
A day or so after they decided they were serious, her 33-year-old boyfriend sent her a Facebook email requesting she become his partner. She accepted, and their respective profiles were updated with their new relationship status. Within hours, messages of congratulations from friends and family appeared on her profile.
"I was stoked because he obviously felt confident enough to announce it in front of all our friends, but at the same time I felt we were revealing a bit too much of ourselves too early on."
A few weeks later, they had their first major argument, and the boyfriend changed his Facebook status from "In a relationship with Helen" to "not in a relationship", without any discussion or warning.
"I felt anger that he hadn't told me, and disbelief. It was a feeling of shame: everyone knew about it before I did, and there's nothing I could do to stop that or cover up in anyway."
They've since met in person and patched things up, but Helen's now considering quitting Facebook. "It's more powerful than people perhaps thought it would become, especially in how you conduct your relationships.
"You should really think carefully about what information you're going to expose about yourself, and how that information could be mishandled."
Employers and top United States colleges use social networking sites to screen candidates. Lee Chisholm of NetSafe says the Internet safety group has heard of a couple of people being refused a job after prospective employers saw something they didn't like on the applicants' profile.
Social networking dynamics often evoke the schoolyard, with its vicious gossip, insidious bullying and merciless popularity contests.
"Especially for the young, there's this desire to have as many friends as possible, so they can let their friends snowball," says Chisholm.
It's this well of social anxiety that puts off Facebook resister Kristina Simons. Though her friends have repeatedly hassled her to join, the 35-year-old DJ, promotions producer and actor is holding firm. "I did the MySpace thing for five seconds. It just felt like a cool club, and I felt like I was being scrutinised, like at high school. And there's that fickle relationship, where you're trying to collect people as a means to prove your coolness more than establish a real relationship."
Says another Facebook hold-out, "It's like personal experience isn't valid unless 10 other people have shared it."
He likens social networking to incessant channel-surfing across the minutiae of others' lives.
Gaunt says some people invest so much of their identity in their virtual selves that leaving an internet-based community can lead to depression, and even genuine suicidal thoughts. "I've seen people who've lost online relationships and become suicidal, others who've been ostracised."
Other critics point to the commercial and political dimensions of social networking. The sites are big business. This month, AOL bought Bebo for $US850 million ($1,058 million). MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and Facebook Inc sold a 1.6 per cent stake to Microsoft last October for $US250 million ($311 million).
Facebook packages information about members' profiles to help advertisers target their ads. To that end, the site has an arrangement with other major US-based websites, such as Sony Online and Blockbuster, whereby the other sites notify Facebook when a Facebook member buys something off them.
Guardian writer Tom Hodgkinson has called Facebook "a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism," which dissolves the boundaries between private citizens and consumers.
Gaunt and Chisholm say there's as much good as bad in social networking. Early results from a Netsafe research project have found teenagers to be resilient and perhaps savvier online networkers than their older counterparts. "They know quite a lot about how to keep themselves safe and how these sites work, and they share that with their friends."
Where they may fall down, says Gaunt, is in their inexperience with real-life relationships, which manifests in emotional bluntness and painful misunderstandings.
But, like them or not, experts see social networks as the harbinger of a new social model. In keeping with our geographical mobility and busy work lives, we're moving towards having more but weaker social ties, while retaining our close ties at the centre.
Gaunt says: "There's always this hysteria associated with new technologies. When the radio came out all libraries were going to close; when home sewing machines came out women were going to rise up.
"[Social networking] is here to stay for now - until the next big thing comes along."
