Generation Facebook

"Generation Facebook"

Facebook is the second largest social networking site in the world, surpassed only by myspace.com. Facebook is the brainchild of Mark Zuckerburg and went live on February of 2004. Since that day it has dramatically revolutionized the face of social interaction and networking as we know it. People can now with the mere click of a mouse and some simple searching/browsing view the lives of their closest friends, family, coworkers, or even complete strangers within their "network".
Originally, facebook was intended as a means of allowing college students (and only college students) the means to network and communicate with each other. It was a digital version of the freshman facebooks that one could order during the first year of college in order to acquaint yourself with your peers. It allowed college students to escape from hectic class schedules, exam preparation, and term paper writing by socializing online with friends. I know this because I have been a facebook user since the fall of 2004. Facebook offered simple, yet humorous, functions that could be used to illicit positive reactions from online friends. For example, the "poke" function that is still available on facebook has been a staple of the website and serves no other purpose except as a way to play online tag.
Eventually facebook would be expanded into new markets. When facebook was opened up to high school students, there was an uproar from the current website using population. The idea of expanding the facebook population would soon allow everyone else in the world the ability to join the website. There seemed to be an almost elitist perspective of the facebook population at that time that high school students should not be allowed to create accounts until they reached college. Facebook, during it’s years before it was opened up to high school students required an email address ending in ".edu" in order to establish an account. By removing this requirement, some feared that eventually everyone would be able to obtain a facebook account. Eventually this fear was realized when facebook decided to open publicly amidst the outcries of the website’s users that this would change facebook more into myspace. The elitist mentality of facebook, whether realized or not realized, was that account holders had to at least have similar higher education goals which can be equated to similar values in life.
Well, so what? Why should any of this matter? Myspace has long been under scrutiny for hosting a large amount of sexual predators that are able to add underage individuals as their friends and communicate with them via wall posts or messages. This communication can be, and at times has proven to be, graphic. The ability for sexual predators to communicate graphically with minors one can reasonably assume that there are problems with the online social networking community. Having such low criterion for obtaining an account that allows you to (1) see at least one picture of the person you’re communicating with (profile pictures) or (2) completely falsify your identity to communicate with individuals of your choosing ("I may be 33, but myspace says I’m 13") can result in corrupting minors on the website past the corruption they bring upon themselves. The possibilities are endless for how these users can be corrupted. Allowing them to advance in the online world allows them to be corrupted and exposed to new ideas and experiences they would have never obtained (or at least not obtained until later in life) without the advent of these social networking sites.
But like I said, I too am a facebook user. And gasp, I even use myspace! So maybe I’m just being hypocritical by chastising these social networking sites for leading to the defamation and corruption of the youth of the world. However I do not blame these websites when only a few people abuse them and for the most part they are used for their intended purpose by many. Blaming the websites is like blaming guns for killing people and trying to regulate guns. It’s not the object that is the problem so much as it is the person using the object that creates the problem. Taking a very top level approach by attacking a solo source (the website) rather than the numerous sources of the real problem (misguided persons) is a much more efficient approach and requires less time, hence why it might seem more popular. Apply that same sentence and insert "gun manufacturers" for "the website" and see if that same concept fits current debate in Washington. That’s what this chapter is about. This chapter looks at the social phenomenon of facebook and how it has dramatically changed our society. You be the judge whether it was for the better or for the worse, but I’ll give you a hint, it’s not for the better!
***
I fought the idea of using facebook jargon when I was writing this chapter, but then I realized that the jargon just adds to the uniqueness of facebook. Not that facebook had any hand in forming these words, but still these are worth noting because they have been created by those that use the website. These slang terms were taken from not only urbandictionary.com, but also from my own conversations with individuals in the Midwest.
Facebook stalking. This means using facebook to learn more about a person that you may know personally or not well at all. Facebook stalking also entails knowing what is currently going on in a person’s life due to the highly popularized new addition of "status" updates, where one can post what one is doing at that point in time, a witty comment, or even one’s emotions. Facebook stalking became easier when can check for not only updated statuses for all friends, but also when you could see which of your friends had recently updated their profiles or pictures by selecting "friends" and looking under status or recently updated profile tabs. This allows someone to keep easy tabs on friends.
Facebook whore/slut. This is an individual that is addicted to facebook and spends an inordinate amount of time on the website searching for friends, facebook stalking (see above), messaging friends, or even poking people. Who knows, right? They just spend a lot of time on facebook. We all know at least one, and you might even be one, too.
Facebooking. The actual practice of using facebook to communicate or being logged onto facebook. Pretty simple.
Checking one’s vitals. Checking one’s vitals is a way of saying that you have to get to a computer and check you email, facebook (or other social networking site), instant messenger, blog, text messaging, etc. You get the idea. Checking some form of communication that does not require face to face interaction, but rather computer interaction.
Tag. This word has lost the sexual connotation that it once held in the late 90's and early 2000's with the advent of facebook. It now means tagging someone in a picture or note. Tagging is a way to indicate that a friend on facebook is in a picture or included in a narrative created by an individual (called a "note", similar to a facebook blog). It allows the "tagee" (the person tagged in the photo) to have more photos on his or her profile and thereby subvert their popularity with others (only if more pictures = more popular). "Detagging" is the opposite of tagging, it is removing one’s identification from a picture or note so that non-mutual friends between the taggor and the taggee cannot see the pictures. Well to be honest, the taggor’s friends can still see the pictures on the taggor’s profile, but the taggee’s friends will not be able to if the tag is removed. Confused yet? I certainly hope so. Read that last part a few more times and try not to let blood shoot out your nose.
"Facebook me". An exclamation or request made by a real life friend to another real life friend asking them to contact them via facebook. Similar to the phrase that was popular at one point in time, (maybe in the 80's with a popular song by Blondie) "Call me".
Facebook creeper. From my understanding this is a little more harsh of a phrase than facebook stalking included above. This is the act of using facebook for less than noble intentions like looking up random people on facebook, reading through visible wall posts, and reviewing all their pictures. This may also be used in conjunction with someone who is rather old and using facebook to contact people much younger than said user.
Facebooked. Looking someone up on facebook or asking someone to be your friend. "I facebook Jim and he accepted my friend request".
Facebooker. Someone that uses facebook.
Facebook friends. Two people that for all purpose and intent are friends only on facebook or became friends through facebook. The friendship either (1) does not exist in real life or (2) exists only because of facebook.
Facebook syndrome. When your facebook account is not truly reflective of who you are by either being falsified with wrong information or making you look better than you really are with flattering pictures.
Facebook terrorism. Using facebook to hurt or terrorize someone.
Facebook slam. Denying someone’s request to be your friend on facebook.
Facebook pimp. Someone who is so socially inept that they cannot obtain a girlfriend or boyfriend via normal social interaction and resort to facebook to obtain a significant other.
Facebook Effect. This is the feeling of deja vu one gets when you meet a person face to face, having already befriended them on facebook, but having never met in person.
So now that you’ve gone through facebook 101, it’s time to move onto the more insightful parts of this chapter. Now I won’t feel as guilty for using facebook jargon if you have definitions provided in print for your benefit! Now onto the real synopsis of how facebook has been changing the culture of our youth.
***
Facebook has had this innate ability to change the way that today’s youth interact with each other. Older people who learn of facebook are often weary of a website where one can post intimate details of one’s life for all to see and rightfully so. In an age where sexual predators can now stalk others from the privacy of their own home, it would make sense to be weary of anything that would make it easier for someone to learn about and ogle complete strangers. Yet for some reason we continue to post to our accounts the most intimate of details and the most embarrassing of photos. Why?
Facebook has created a culture that stems from our adolescent years. The tired "everyone is doing it" mentality has aided in millions of people logging onto facebook because it’s the thing that all the cool kids do. Think about how you signed up for facebook (if you did) or how many times you’ve been asked if you have facebook, or even asked by others to join facebook. There is a degree of peer pressure that is exerted on individuals to join facebook. If not peer pressure, then we can be sure that sheer curiosity has propelled us to type in http://www.facebook.com and register for an account (or even http://www.thefacebook.com, depending on when you joined). And then once you joined the site, you immediately began looking for friends to add them. Facebook has made it even more easy to add people by allowing you to sign onto your email account, import your email contacts, and add them via "friend finder".
Then what? You begin to communicate with these individuals and learn about their lives. Every intimate detail that they choose to publish on facebook and allow others to see is there for your amusement. We, being social creatures, for some reason love learning about other people. That’s mostly the reason why gossip is so much fun to engage in and hear. You are being provided or providing information to someone who otherwise would have no knowledge of what you are telling/hearing. All of the additional features on facebook like status updates, updated profiles, relationship stories, or even wall posts help to create a nice little social gossip network going that both interests and excites users to a degree that they can spend a majority of their time on the website during the day (creating facebook whores, sluts, and creepers mentioned above).
At this current point, I have no quantitative or qualitative evidence to support this next idea, but it seems that facebooking has the ability reduce one’s ability to communicate with individuals outside of the online community. I’m not trying to throw in so much nostalgia into this chapter, but when most of us think about earlier decades, human interaction was much higher than it is right now. We can perform a great deal of tasks with the aid of the internet. Our need to leave the safety of our homes is greatly decreasing with increasing capabilities of technologies and companies changing marketing and distributing strategies to meet the demands of their customers.
But then in defense of facebook, I offer that today’s urban areas are much larger (population) than they have been in the past and that maybe offering social networking tools is just an adaptation to allow people to feel more comfortable in their respective networks. Think about how hard it is at times for people to meet others in a new city or at college campus. The fear of rejection is just enough to compel people to not talk to anyone. But then again, we all know that person who can talk to anyone and has thousands of friends. But let’s not talk about that guy. He’s the exception.
Most of us are shy individuals but feel the need to socially interact without the fear of rejection. We also love to learn more about others but the thought of having to reciprocate intimate details about ourselves in person and having others judge us can at times be too much. Allowing a method for people to learn about others and socially interact (facebook is in fact some form of social interaction, you must agree) without at the same time facing fear of rejection or judgment provides the perfect, addictive medium for people to use to fulfill their guilty pleasures.
I once had a friend tell me about the history of the backyard and the front yard. Apparently when houses were first being settled and people still used outhouses, people would spend a lot of time on their front porches (because retreating to the backyard was less the pleasurable, obviously). During these times people were very social with their neighbors and often knew everyone on their block. With the advent of indoor plumbing, people eventually began to congregate less on the front yard and more in the backyard (due to the absence of the outhouses). This slight technological change had the unintended affect of making neighborhoods less social when people began to retreat to the backyard. I’m not saying they were asocial, I’m just asserting they became less social. The backyard can be a closed off place where you can hide from the eyes of people that pass by on the sidewalk. It has a degree of privacy that is not the same as the front yard. Before when it was common place for people to know all the people on their street, now it has become an abnormality for people to even know their immediate neighbors!
So why did I tell you that stories about the outhouse? It seems that with the slightest invention, social patterns and interaction change dramatically. There are other examples. With the invention of the telephone, people were able to talk to individuals that lived far away and keep in close contact with someone (immediate contact rather than communication through mail correspondence) making it easier to keep strong ties across great lengths. Now take that wonderful invention a few steps further. With the invention of cellular phones, people were able to me reached at any point in time with a phone call (if someone had enough day time minutes, that is). The cell phone is such an intrusive, yet handy invention to have. On the positive, you can reach anyone anytime you want, and on the negative you can be reached at anytime as well. Cell phones changed the way we communicate with each other into a less face-to-face interaction and more text messaging, more emailing at all hours of the day, multi-media messages, walkie-talkie minutes, and mobile chat (for Blackberry users). Who needs to actually talk to friends on the phone when you can send a text and not have to bother with the dynamics of conversation? Haha. Conversations have become a thing of the past.
How many times have you gone a day without your cell phone in a panic? When was the last time that you went on vacation without your cell phone? I’ve seen people at the beach emailing and texting on their cell phones. I’ve seen people with lap tops in a pool glider chatting with people from home while on vacation. Today if a hotel doesn’t have wireless internet... well let’s stop there. All hotels have wireless internet. But you get the idea. If it doesn’t have wireless internet it can’t compete with other hotels because everyone expects free wireless internet because most of their customers will have their laptops available and cannot forgo one day of internet communication.
So how does this apply to facebook? Facebook was intended to be a "social utility". A utility is a software program that functions for a particular purpose. In this case its function is for social interaction. People very quickly took to this website and like any society (be it internet or real life) began constructing social mores or rules that would govern it outside of what the founders had installed. If you look at some of the options that you have on facebook, for instance what you are on facebook for (see "looking for" in the edit your profile section), you can select anything from "networking" (ok), "friendship" (still understandable), "a relationship" (this is where it starts to get a bit creepy in a free eHarmony type way), "random play" (what is this????), or even the dreaded "whatever I can get". Although facebook offers these options, it is very unrealistic for anyone to actually try to date you via facebook. That is quite possibly facebook more #1; never accost anyone on facebook for a date if you don’t know them. However, just like in regular society there are exceptions to this rule. Normally this happens when the accosting party is very attractive to the accosted, or the accosted and the accostor are both desperately lonely. Pick your poison.
Facebook also has the ability to allow people to know about the lives of complete strangers. Relationships, hobbies, interests, activities, other friends, and other personal information including residence or a contact phone number. Used irresponsibly, or if not guarded closely by the account holder, this information can be used in a detrimental manner. Essentially, facebook and other social networking sites can easily be used for stalking individuals, both online and in person.
For instance, when facebook was still relatively new and had just added the "make your profile private" function (so that only friends could see your profile), a "friend" of mine (a former friend whom I no longer speak to) would browse through female profiles looking for cell phone numbers to make prank phone calls. He was successful on numerous occasions by making contact and harassing these individuals in what he considered to be "good fun". Given that he posed no real threat to these girls (that I was aware of, but then again who knows?), the possibility exists for someone else to abuse these websites. Remember, I’m not saying it will happen, I’m saying it might. Keeping your profile safely guarded and private is something that should always be considered with as many sexual predators lurking online as there are currently. The point is that facebook has not only helped redefine our culture, but it has also had the unintended consequence of making it easier (not easy) for anyone to learn all about us in the time it takes to read through one’s profile.
So now to relate facebook into the destruction of our culture. I’ve briefly hit on some points while providing a slight narrative of some of the experiences I and others have had with facebook. The major change that facebook has made in our culture is that it is increasingly easy to learn about people in a short amount of time without really having to put a lot of personal information out there (if we so choose) or even taking the time to learn about someone. We can make judgments as to a person’s character based upon the groups that he or she belongs to, the visible wall posts that we can read, the pictures that have been taken of the person in question, any of the personal information included on a profile, status updates, common friends, or any other information that we can derive from applications an individual has added to their profile. It has dramatically changed the effort that is needed to communicate in person which has both benefits and drawbacks. One benefit is that we can keep in touch with friends that move away relatively easy and avoid running up phone bills or spending an inordinate amount of time talking on the phone with short facebook messages or wall posts. However, and believe me I’m trying to avoid a slippery slope argument here, it can change the way that we are able to communicate on a personal basis with others. Hear me out now and just let me finish before you stop reading entirely. Through my own observations, it seems as if some of today’s youth who have become so ingrained in the facebook culture have difficulty communicating in person. Most of us (a majority of us, actually), remember what it was like to communicate and to converse intimately in public before the advent of facebook. Every young person that I’ve met that is either fresh into college or still in high school, seems to have some difficulty communicating effectively or in a pattern that I am familiar to. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances I am unaware of, or maybe it’s a generational thing. Who knows? Either way, my fear is that facebook has become so ingrained in this upcoming generation that they will be more inept than prior generations at communicating effectively.
Personally, I want to come back and read this in 20 years and laugh at either how correct I was with the last paragraph or at how erroneous I was. Will facebook make it further into the future? How far will it go? Will it really have any affect on our culture and society that can be quantified? What will become of the generation that relies so strongly on facebook, the generation I call the "facebook generation"? Only time will tell, I guess.
II Destructive Cultures
The second section of this book relates to destructive cultures. These are the observations and cultural values that have somehow been ingrained into certain cultures that pose serious threats to the success of any member of these cultures. Information, observations, and opinions provided in section is not meant to offend anyone or even be taken as racist, sexist, or any kind of "ist" you can think of.
Observations for this section will range widely across the American spectrum.
Part i: African American Culture
Writing my observations about the self-destructive African American culture is a very touchy subject in this country. Race in general is. I’ve contemplated on exactly how to go about doing this in both a tactful and respect way. The problem with writing anything about another race in American, and especially doing it if you’re white, is that you run the risk of being called a racial bigot, a racist, and being stigmatized by others for the rest of your life. Yet racism is something that for some reason or another has managed to continue through generations and penetrates the speech of even the most educated of American citizens.
Has anyone ever thought about how racism is still perpetuated in society today well past the years of slavery and long after hard-fought wins for civil rights? Let’s actually expand the horizon and include all races, not even just African Americans. Racism still exists for all forms or race outside of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Some forms of racism have cooled in recent decades (Catholics, Jewish, Japanese, interracial marriages, etc.) but still racism generally still exists today.
Most of the time we will hear racism come forth through friendly conversations or even racist jokes told around groups of same-race friends. Myself being white, I must admit that I have never heard a white joke before in my life. One can only wonder if members of different races have white jokes they tell amongst themselves and away from earshot of anyone who might be white, or maybe if other races even engage in telling jokes about people of other races. Maybe one of you can email me and let me know if this is the case.
Carlos Mencia’s comedy is deeply rooted in racial observations. His stand up often relies on stereotypes of the different races that everyone is aware of. I have been a fan of Carlos since I saw his first stand up special on Comedy Central shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It moved me how he told racially based jokes about all the races and gave each of them equal opportunity (a really bad pun, I apologize). Yet for some reason, no one gets mad at him. This has always intrigued me. How can someone of one particular race make jokes about all the other races and not excite the masses? Is it his delivery? Is it his material? Is it because he’s a comedian? Is it because he is of a non-white race? Is it because he is a comedian who is of a non-white race? I have no idea, but for some reason he does a fantastic job of observing how race is still very much noticed today.
Carlos makes a lot of good points in his stand up comedy. He often at times has stated that white people have been so stigmatized by such historical events like slavery that they feel they cannot laugh in public at jokes people make that are race based. He has at times stated that in public white people are conscious of people of other races in the audience that might become mad if a white person laughs at jokes Mencia is telling about them. He goes on to describe that, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘that as soon as you guys leave the show you can’t wait to tell all your white friends around the water cooler all the jokes that Carlos said last night’. This for the most part is true. White people really cannot tell jokes about other races except within the company of close friends they trust with whom they are from a similar race.
But I digress. I have observed that this phenomenon is true in our culture. We cannot make jokes about other races in front of other races if we are from a different race. Was that confusing enough for you? In much the same way that jesting about other races is off limits if you are from another race, the same is true for making helpful observations about other races.
Now I’m not talking about anything that is meant in malfeasance. What I’m talking about are my observations about a culture that is ingrained in the African American race itself (but there are always exceptions to the rule).
Throughout my life I have noticed that African American culture has always been different than that of white culture. I respect these differences. But not all parts of the culture seem to be beneficial to the race. Certain parts are self-destructive and are a cancer that threatens the success of the race. Those that fall victim to this culture are easily discernable for others that have not. Some parts of this self destructive culture are even visible in other cultures and are not so much the product of the race, but of the times and of the media.
The media today portrays a culture where individuals consume and consume merchandise. Viewers see this as a means of expressing to the world that one is successful. Our outward expression of ourselves now is more important than our internal character. I say this in confidence because the media today has made over-consumption popular. Most of our reality TV programming involves viewing how the rich live and witnessing their extraordinary purchasing power. This sub-reality makes it easy for us to fall victim to the sense that we too must have wildly exotic consumer goods to distinguish ourselves from others (and to differentiate ourselves as ‘better’). Our lust for objects has grown at such an alarming rate that the most current trend in commercials that we see on TV is for debt consolidation, credit report checks, and other ways to relief the massive amount of debt we have obtained from living beyond our means. For us, stuff equals success, success equals more friends, and more friends equal happiness. We are so consumed with trying to buy our happiness like we see in media when people who hold certain material possessions present a happy look on their faces. But after the item is bought, and the happiness has been replaced with the credit card bill and the realization that amounting debt is pushing us further to bankruptcy, where do we stand now? Have we made ourselves more attractive to the other sex? Have we earned the respect and adoration of our neighbor? Why is competition so ingrained in our culture? Keeping up with the Jones’s is no longer good enough. Now we’re "Keeping up with the Cardassians".
If I could pick any one media outlet that is responsible for how the youth have fallen under this spell of consuming lust, I would have to pick MTV. That’s right, I said it. MTV portrays a culture that is not only destructive to the youth (more about this later), but is self-destructive to African American culture. Music videos degrade women as mere sex objects and sex objects cannot garner respect from anyone. Music videos show musicians with a larger than life where one’s quality of life is measured by how much "bling" you have around your neck or in your mouth. It’s defined by what you drink, be it Courvoisier Cognac or Christal Champagne. Penthouse suites, larger than life sport utility vehicles, a plethora of barely used shoes, designer label clothing,