Many Kiwis refuse to join social networking sites like Facebook. But as the online community grows, it's becoming even tougher to stay away. Jehan Casinader confronts his social networking nightmare and meets others who are doing the same.
For four years, I've conducted an experiment - to stay off the social networking grid. Like a Greenie with a solar panel on his roof, I wanted to generate my own power. I ignored the Facebook faithfuls. I avoided the Bebo brigade. I missed out on the trials and tribulations of the Twitter tribe. As a result, I've been ridiculed by those who are big fans of online networking. I'd prefer to stay offline. But now, I'm ready to crack. It seems no one can escape the tentacles of the world's fastest-growing community.
Facebook's major selling point is hard to ignore: it allows you to stay connected. It's no surprise, then, that the site has attracted almost 500 million users in less than five years. Marketing big-wigs have proclaimed that we are on the cusp of a social media "revolution". Sites like Facebook have "radically" changed the way we live our lives, they say. Facebook has brought us "closer together", and made us more "connected". Translation: we should be grateful to live in such a technologically enlightened age.
But for those of us who want to avoid Facebook, it's nearly impossible to have a social life. Want to know about births, deaths and marriages? You might as well be living under a rock. Parties and reunions? Destroy your letterbox. Old friends? Take your number out of the phone book. If you're not on Facebook, and especially if you are under the age of 30, you might as well be dead.
Olivia Bell knew her social life would take a hit when she shut down her Facebook account, but she'd had enough.
"I was sick of people stalking me on Facebook," she says. "I had 500 'friends', but most weren't real friends. They'd believe anything I wrote on my page. I told them I'd won a trip for four to New York, and some of them could join me. I told them I was engaged, and that I was sporting a huge diamond ring. Everyone believed it. It started off as a joke, because I was bored at work one day. But it started to spiral out of control. So one of my friends bet me $50 to stay off Facebook for six months."
By accepting the challenge, Bell joined a group of Kiwis who've avoided social sites. Out of stubbornness? Perhaps. But mostly out of curiosity.
Non-Facebookers demand real conversation. We want to spend less time online, observing the banalities of other people's lives. We want to avoid becoming obsessed with our own "status". We don't want to be bombarded with online marketing. We want our private lives to be private. And we'd prefer not to be tagged or poked. It's about logging off, and getting a life.
Bell's mates thought she couldn't quit Facebook for six months, but she did. During that time, Bell was left off the invitation list for parties, but her hiatus from Facebook was "refreshing". Bell, who works for a government department, is now back on the site, but uses it in a totally different way. She spends less time on it and is selective about who she befriends. While she used to be a "photo queen", Bell no longer publishes pictures of other people's drunken exploits and asks her friends to not do so either.
Facebook allows people to carefully craft an image for themselves, a personality to project to their online community. Perhaps it's just about ego. Andy Warhol reckoned, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." These websites allow us to have a slice of it. In some ways, they resemble high school popularity contests. Can anyone really have 2000 friends? Do they have too much spare time, or perhaps too much broadband? When I finally signed up to Facebook last month, I was hoping for some answers.
My "news feed" was soon full of chatter. Some of the news, views and reviews were of interest. Most were not. There was a mountain of complaints about the weather, diarrhoea, washing detergent, tonsillitis and fire alarms in the middle of the night. The rest was a sad mix of Saturday night party pics, inane quiz results and YouTube links.
One person observed that the clapping of two coconut halves resembles the sound of a horse clip-clopping down a cobblestone street. Is this really why I joined Facebook?
Sure, the site's popularity is highest among 18 to 30-year-olds. But new local research tells us that more than half of 30 to 44-year-olds and a third of 45 to 59-year-olds, are part of an online community.
Fifty-three-year-old Debbie Barlow is holding out. Her husband, "a staid accountant", has embraced Facebook, and her relatives overseas have done so too. But Barlow has no desire to connect with them. She works in hospitality and has a counselling degree up her sleeve. She can see the future of the Facebook generation.
"I'm quite switched-on, and I can see the merits of Facebook. But like many things on the net, it's quite anti-social. I am a people person. I want to have eye contact with the people I talk to. Young people today don't seem to want that. They have been brought up with technology. They're computer-savvy, but not emotionally savvy. Facebook is an environment which is potentially unsafe. I've seen people become addicted to it."
The sheer volume of content on Facebook is more than any of us can digest. Yet most users are convinced that others will be interested in their pithy posts. Status updates, tweets and comments often focus on the mundane. I asked one of my "friends" to tell her Facebook friends that she had a ham sandwich for lunch. Within minutes they had given it a hearty thumbs-up. In a world of non-stop news, the consumption of a ham sandwich piques our interest. Maybe we can no longer sort the wheat from the chaff.
Andrew Tait, 25, used to have about 300 friends on Facebook, and says that number was "probably on the low side". Only 100 of those contacts were "real" friends. Tait explains many 20-somethings befriend anyone and everyone in order to boost their all-important "friends lists". He didn't want to dent their egos, so he agreed to their requests. But after two years on Facebook, he'd had enough, and shut his account.
"You'd have someone as a friend on Facebook, but you'd walk past each other in the street without acknowledging each other. It's bizarre. The more friends you have, the more you're expected to post status updates and be entertaining. I didn't like popping up in people's photos everywhere. I found it quite invasive. And I didn't like the way people portrayed themselves on Facebook. Often, they write messages on your 'wall' simply because they want other people to see what they've written. It's pretty weird."
In real life, we're paranoid about who's eavesdropping at the water cooler, and who's peeking over our shoulder at the ATM. Online, it seems we are much more open, and we expect others to be. But why do we want our social lives to be public? If someone invited you to their house, you wouldn't pull out a pack of crayons and start doodling on their wall. But on Facebook, our 'walls' are covered with other people's doodles. Victoria University psychologist Marc Wilson agrees that much of it seems vain.
"There is evidence we're becoming more narcissistic. Online, you can develop a facade; a personality. We put ourselves out there, because we want to be validated. And even if people aren't interested in what we write, they are likely to read it. But if someone looks at your wall, it allows them to experience something they may not in real life. Like reality-TV and soap operas, social sites allow us to live vicariously."
Are these sites supporting real-life human interaction, or are they replacing it? British psychologist Dr Aric Sigman says the number of hours we spend interacting face-to-face has fallen. Other commentators have linked social networks to depression, cyber-bullying and, yes, even cancer. But Wilson believes we are unlikely to see a day when people sit in their houses at night with almost no face-to-face contact. In fact, he says Facebook can be healthy for those who are introverted or anxious about relationships.
When Tait quit Facebook, five of his mates followed. Those who quit are often criticised for being anti-social, but Tait says he is very social. He just doesn't want his social life to be played out online. Even while he was on Facebook, he made very few updates to his page. But he was easily able to "stalk" other people who had made their profiles public: colleagues, relatives, and girls he was interested in. At the time, Tait felt guilty about it. Now, the temptation to peek at others' profiles has gone.
Facebook has been described as the Frankenstein of the internet. You can't delete your account until you've waited out a two-week period. Even once your account has been deleted, some of your data will be stored by Facebook.
The site's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, says personal privacy is no longer the norm, but Kiwis lack agreement. A Privacy Commission survey found 57 per cent of us believe social sites are mainly private; 42 per cent say they're mainly public. The Commission said it found the result surprising.
Although 30-year-old Joanna Alpe has never had a Facebook profile, she knows she has been mentioned on the site, and there are "heaps of photos" of her on her friends' pages. It's harmless stuff, but Alpe is uneasy that there's a virtual documentary of her life online, in a space she has no control over. She enjoys Twitter, but doesn't need or want a Facebook page. As time goes by, her friends can see why she has stayed away.
"It's like they all joined a new country called Facebook, with a government that no one got to elect," says Alpe. "That government can call the shots and change the rules whenever they want. The citizens signed an agreement, a privacy statement, without reading it. Now, all of a sudden they're saying, 'what do you mean my information is not private?' People used to be surprised when I told them I wasn't on Facebook. In the past few months, a lot of people have said 'oh, you're so lucky, I'm sick of it'."
According to Facebook's critics, enough is enough. They've been predicting a mass exodus from the site; an exodus which hasn't happened.
On May 31, the worldwide "Quit Facebook Day" inspired just 30,000 of Facebook's 500 million users to disable their accounts. Facebook is still growing by more than 700,000 users per day. But the web's faddish quality cannot be forgotten. Bebo's owners recently announced their site may close due to a lack of ad revenue. MySpace has also lost a chunk of its market share.
Alpe is not on Facebook but she's a social media strategist. She advises others to join the site if it suits their needs and agrees that social networking has many advantages. These websites have a degree of honesty and bluntness which is often absent in real-world conversations. Because the users are shielded behind computers, suggests Alpe, perhaps it's easier for some of them to be honest. But she warns there is a fine line between being honest, and simply "spilling your guts" for all your contacts to see.
The pressure to join Facebook, says Alpe, is a kind of "modern-day peer pressure".
I've experienced it first-hand. Last year, in Southern Egypt, I took a photo with some locals, who pointed at my camera and exclaimed, "Facebook, Facebook!"
Through a translator, they implored me to "add" them as friends on Facebook. But they looked bewildered when told that I wasn't on the site. I was left feeling uneasy and slightly amused that while a bunch of young, rural Egyptian men were on the site, I was not.
When I signed up to Facebook last month, many people added me as "friends". But when they found there was nothing on my page, some turned their privacy settings to full blast, and locked me out. The online community can be just as fickle as the real one but I've joined 1.1 million Kiwis who reckon Facebook is worth their time and energy.
I can't be sure that I will be on Facebook forever. But here's one thing I can guarantee: if I buy a ham sandwich, you will be the last person to hear about it.
