Facebooking Reality: An Essay By Dakalos

Why I didn’t have Facebook until yesterday, and why I finally gave in

Yesterday, I “got “ Facebook. I signed up for a profile, set my privacy settings to highest level, tooled around a bit to find my friends, hoping of course that they hadn’t set their privacy settings to the highest level as well. I found it a little creepy that people I knew years ago were recommended as friends to me by Facebook’s recommendation system, even though I hadn’t put in any information that would suggest that I ever knew these people. I guess at some point, they ran a search for me. Once my profile was set up, and I started to receive confirmations of “friendship,” it was congratulations and welcomes all around.

Basking in the glow of being the initiate, I reflected on why it took me so long to set up a Facebook account. I am, by a margin of years, the last person in my group of friends to get one. The same friends have been pressuring me for years to get an account, and up until recently, I took a certain pleasure in my rebellion against the behemoth of social networking. I fancied myself one of the last holdouts against a culture that is increasingly obsessed with being able to find out as much information about people as possible at any time. But I have found myself having to justify my decision not to join Facebook more and more. After a while, it was even presumed that I had made an active decision not to join Facebook rather than simply having not decided to join.

The main reason has to be my profession. I am a teacher of high-school students, and I simply did not want the hassle of dealing with students who wanted to be my Facebook friends. I am also old enough to remember when Facebook first started, and it seemed like every other day there was a story in the news about how Facebook was a problem in schools. Whether it was cyber-bullying or simply students obsessively checking their profiles, I can be forgiven for thinking that there was no good to be had in joining Facebook.

And then something happened: everybody stopped caring. Now there are fewer publicised Facebook scandals, and it’s just assumed that everyone is on Facebook. It is no longer the secret world of teenagers that is beyond the reach of parents and teachers. If anything, Facebook now makes bullying easier to track. It has become the norm, and those who aren’t on it, are outside of the norm.  Now, almost all of my colleagues are on Facebook, and it’s been about two years since any of them experienced a professional problem related to it.  In fact, two years ago if I told a student that I wasn’t on Facebook, they would instantly understand my decision. Now they just look at me like they don’t understand.

In addition, there was the privacy factor. I didn’t necessarily want pictures of my various (and many) indiscretions posted on the internet for all to see. Unfortunately what I want doesn’t matter. There are already a lot of pictures of me on Facebook; I can’t change that. The problem is that when I didn’t have an account, I couldn’t even see them.  Now I can at least see the pictures of myself and manage them to a certain extent.

In a way, it has become a bit abnormal, even suspicious to not have Facebook. I am not quite old enough to be able to play the “eccentric luddite” card having grown up with computers and using them in both my professional and personal lives. People almost expect to be able to look me up online. Not having a Facebook account makes me almost too private, as if I have something to hide. It is assumed that everyone in a certain age category must maintain an online profile of some sort. Sometimes that includes several profiles on several pages.  Choosing not to have an online profile is like choosing not to chat around the water cooler in the morning: you’re either trying to prove a point, or you’ve got something to hide. Either way, it is a point of conversation that is worth talking about (“Oh really! You don’t have Facebook. That’s interesting. Why not?”). The fact that you don’t like water is not assumed to be part of the decision.

It may seem like I simply joined Facebook as a resignation that personal privacy is dead, and as an assertion that I am not an old man with secrets to hide, but I do have one positive reason for joining Facebook. It has become the norm for communicating personal information that you want to share with others. Recently, a good friend of mine came down with a bad case of swine flu. Rather than emailing around to say that he was sick, he simply posted it on Facebook and understandably got on with the business of resting up and getting better. The problem was that I had no idea about this until another friend informed me over the phone, adding something like, “oh ya, you didn’t hear. You don’t have Facebook.” At this point, I started to think that it was a bit selfish of me not to have Facebook, and to put the onus on my friends to relay information to me by other means.

I really have to say that I resent Facebook. I resent feeling pressured to join, I resent the invasion of privacy, and I most certainly resent the fact that Facebook has become the norm for communicating personal information. But Facebook is here, and it is not going away any time soon. I briefly clung to the idea that it would be a fad and that “this too would pass,” but it seems that I was mistaken.  In the end, my reason for joining Facebook is that the benefits of embracing it far outweigh the benefits of not joining.