Facebook cannot replace community
by Eric Parker
We as a society and a college community have a troublesome obsession: Facebook. It permeates our lives in a way that no social network or internet-based product should. After reading Tracy Perkins-Schmittler’s article last week [“Principles apply to online community,” April 10], I feel like Facebook has become one of the most overanalyzed and overblown tools on the Web. When it comes down to it, it is just a Web page where you can put up pictures and send messages to people. Your page is nothing more than an avatar. It is not real life. I repeat: the Internet is not real life.
When it boils down to it, half of the purpose of Facebook is to force you to look at advertisements. If it were truly meant to be a social tool and email client, Facebook administrators would pay attention to the feedback and needs of its users. But they don’t, because Facebook is just for fun.
I myself have a Facebook account. I have my own criteria for friending and defriending people. It is quite simple. If I like you and I know you, I will friend you or respond to your friend request. If I don’t like you or I don’t want you peeping into my personal life, I will not.
If I friend you and then decide I don’t like you, I will delete you. I don’t care if you are my neighbor or classmate and I see you every day, rules still apply. Call me callous, but honestly, you will know my opinion about you through mediums other than Facebook. Otherwise, I would be being deceptive. Many people dislike others but remain friends with them on Facebook. Is that worse than deleting somebody you do not like? I have every right to delete and add people however I choose, and others have the right to be offended. However, I don’t care, because all the time spent arguing on the internet over something that happened on a Web site could be spent instead talking to me and working out differences in real life.
Facebook should not be viewed as a community. That is just an excuse for people to justify spending hours online talking to each other about relatively meaningless gossip. Whoever is reading this article, I want you to think for a minute, when did you ever have a conversation on Facebook extending past “hey man whats up what are u doing this weekend,” “dude I was really drunk and left my backpack in your room, can i come get it,” or “omg lol check out this video?”
A community is a group of people who can gather together and meaningfully interact and discuss common interests. The only way Facebook is a community is because it has networks. Otherwise, it is just a communication tool. Calling it a community is just a way to gather more users and encourage them to interact on the Web site. It is a marketing term. Remember, Facebook is a product owned by a large for-profit corporation.
I guess my real message to everybody today is as follows: get the hell off the Internet and go outside and talk to people! I cringe whenever I hear people talking about what happened on Facebook last night and whose relationship status changed. How did we ever manage ten years ago without such a useful tool? Oh yeah, we actually interacted with people personally. I almost forgot to how to do that.
Facebook is creepy. It has a built-in program that monitors your search statistics and online purchases in order to bring you advertisement “suggestions” that the administrators think you would be interested. Translation: Mark Zuckerberg wants to sell you shit. Shit you didn’t think you needed until you saw the advertisement. That makes me use Facebook less and less. Instead, I hang out with my friends more and more, as I want to reduce my online footprint as much as possible. Government’s tracking me and other paranoid thoughts. So let’s detach our self from this mass-market advertisement corporation masquerading as a “social network” and instead hang out sometime. It will be fun.
Eric Parker is a sophomore art major and can be reached at eaparker07@earlham.edu.
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