Facebook - a very big, claustrophobic, bubble

Published by neil on June 21st, 2007

Facebook’s recent growth is certainly impressive - are there any interweb users out there who have not had several invitations to join? My gut-level dislike for Facebook stems not from concerns of a large bubble which may burst, but from a large bubble with deliberately increasing wall thickness.

There is one element to Facebook that makes the alarm bells ring for me, in contrast to almost every other major social network: you have to be logged-in to do anything, anything at all. Nothing is visible or accessible to the outside. Even notification emails about messages, etc., force you to log in to view them. Everything is designed to get you inside, and keep you there.

Facebook to me feels immediately claustrophobic, a state of interweb virtual bondage where the only safeword is ‘logout’. The sterilised, razorwire-topped walls are (currently) unscalable and the locks are more sturdy than Broadmoor. But even in a physical prison you can have real visitors: in Facebook, your visitors have to join and become part of the exclusive hive themselves, trapped squirming in its peer pressure driven, shallow society. Four people have now made me feel bad about not building my profile, adding an avatar, or joining multiple groups. You know who you are; and you’re just going to have to deal with my minimal acceptance of your bubble-hive mentality. Oh, sorry, you can’t read this, can you, as all you do is hang around inside Faceprison. Go on, just you try reading this blog from in there… 

If the Facebook bubble does not burst, then the widespread narrowing of focus of millions online will be wholly detrimental to the health of the interweb in the future. The net’s openness, although admittedly giving free fuel to a number of less than tasteful activities, has enabled this medium to become a vital part of the world today, both on personal and commercial fronts. Facebook means to break that growth trend through segregation, creating an apparent pseudo-utopia of safe networking protected by passwords and squint-inducing CAPTCHA images slapped across virtually every submission form.

Under normal circumstances I would simply assume that Facebook was the focus of the latest geek fetish swarm - geeks buzz around the newest geek space, throw its servers into a fit of request overload, then move rapidly to the next. But Facebook have done a superb job of attracting users from well outside the geek-space, you know, plain old simple internet users (many even over 30 - you should know better!). I fear the worst for those lost souls in particular who will suffer a similar fate to those of us who took up AOL in the early days of “we just might let you kinda see what’s going on in the real internet, you know, maybe… just a bit.’

Tags: facebook, Geek, interweb, Personal, social-networks, TechGeek
Posted in Personal, TechGeek |