Let’s face it, my generation is obsessed with Facebook. With over 800 million users, one in every 13 people worldwide are logged on at any given point, and the number of college-age users on Facebook grew by 74 percent in just one year. Sometimes I wonder what a society without Facebook would be like; a society where it takes more than a click to earn a friend, and your whole life isn’t packaged onto a single profile page like an advertisement complete with personal photos and video. Facebook markets itself as a forum for genuine personal and professional connections, but as it continues to grow, this genuineness of these connections continue to fade.
Gone are the days when a first impression consisted of a face-to-face meeting and a physical handshake. Anyone who wants to know anything about you – without actually meeting you – knows exactly where to go. Facebook is the one place millions of people have been conveniently chronicling their lives through posts, pictures, and videos for as long as they’ve had a profile (which for many of today’s users begins the day they turn 13, Facebook’s minimum age requirement). With just a couple of clicks, we have the ability to anonymously scour entire profiles, and that’s more than enough information for some to justify passing judgment and making serious assumptions about the profile owners. Facebook has seemingly taken all the work out of building a legitimate relationship.
So what is it that makes Facebook so addicting for so many people? Do we really desire to forge long-lasting relationships through social media, or do we simply long to have a seat at the digital table? For as public and popular as Facebook is, secrecy is really the key to its success. I doubt most people would be spending hours sifting through profiles if they knew their visits could be monitored by the owners of these profiles. Most people are more concerned with keeping their thumb on the pulse of their entire network than keeping up their own profiles. Facebook calls it “connecting,” I’ll call it “monitoring.”
I don’t blame Facebook users for wanting to build such large online networks of “friends.” After all, the desire for social interaction is vital to our success and evolution as a species. However, I do question the sincerity of the connections developed with such large networks. According to Facebook’s statistics page, the average Facebook user has 130 friends. I would have a hard enough time naming 130 truly important people in my life, let alone naming 130 friends. Even so, it’s not uncommon to see friend numbers in the seven or eight hundreds. At that level, I find it safe to assume that some of those people are most likely friends of friends of friends, and as such, have no real connection with the person who requested their friendship in the first place.
I can’t afford to be too hypocritical when it comes to Facebook and its massive membership, for I am one of the 800 million. And for its ability to effortlessly bring people from all over the world onto one platform with the ability to share their ideas, promote their causes, and participate in open discussion, Facebook is indeed an incredible social utility that serves a plethora of purposes. However, the point at which we begin to rely on Facebook to offer us a sense of self-worth or use it as our primary source for convenient social interaction is the point at which we need to take a step back from the computer screen and back into reality.
We need to be reminded that, in the real world, creating strong, beneficial relationships takes time, effort, and sacrifice. In the real world, the “like” button will never suffice. Your opinions will require some decent explanation and support, and you won’t always be able to voice your opinions from the comfort and safety of your own couch where there is no real threat of repercussion. In the real world, when you find yourself at the lowest of lows, an overwhelming majority of your 720 “friends” will not be there for you, nor will they honestly care what you’re going through. The people you can count on are the ones who care more about the real person behind the profile picture, not the typically over-competent, outgoing, and successful persona that person has projected for themselves through their online info tabs and interactions.
It’s time to log off Facebook, at least for a little while, and really get connected. Spend that extra time developing a real, feasible, physical social network – one that might actually get you somewhere.