I remember my excitement about finding Facebook. Finally, a spot where a lot of my closest friends and, well…just everyone… are all in one place.  They were not all there when I started but most of them are now.  There was a rush of reconnecting with folks from high school and some ex’s and a period of weeding out those kids that grew up to be the kind of adults that flame my friends on my wall.  I tried out playing Zombies and did a little Super Poking and eventually sorted through the applications and the friends, groups, and pages that worked and made sense.  Facebook has become more prominent than email for my communication and has replaced my newsletter for my massage practice.  It really has become the center of my internet world, I often find my news there, correspond, check in, play some games and do some business.

The best unexpected pleasure has been finding those Facebook connections that work, and prove to be a very particular kind of connection.  And interestingly, they are not always the same of my friendships that work.  There are several folks with whom my acquaintanceship with has not had the opportunity to advance to a deeper friendship, probably for logistical reasons mostly.  They are on Facebook regularly and my fondness for them has grown as has their impact on my life.  I have read books by their favorite author, followed the comments on their status updates and gotten and received advice and parenting, running, cooking, etc.

Lets Keep it “Secret”

There was recently a rash of groups started and joined called “Secret X” with X being a city name. I admit that I initially joined Secret Oakland, thinking, “Great!  A place to find out what is going on off the beaten track.”  As Secret City groups continued popping up and more of my friends started joining them, I started to get a little annoyed.  Not that I wouldn’t want most of my friends to be a part of all of the secret things in my life… It is more that I would rather with those friends be invited to an event, find a restaurant or see a show that doesn’t have a psuedo-countercultural vibe all over it, while it is all over the internet at the same time. I went back and looked today and it did turn out that the group had turned into something that is not about secrets at all, but about the “Best place to…” which doesn’t seem any different than yelp or the East Bay Express.

This was shortly after the last of the many updated screen formats (which they still haven’t gotten right) and the first time that I started to question my intentions and use of facebook instead of just coasting and enjoying it. I started thinking about having some boundaries around how much I am on it and what I use it for. The simple time equation of the elusive Facebook time versus practicing guitar, exercising, spending time with friends and family is pretty convincing some days.  I have no clear answers yet, just still thinking.  I quickly dropped most of my fan pages, I am no longer a fan of “not being on fire” or “If 1m people join, girlfriend will let me turn our house into a pirate ship ” and I am also not imagining that Facebook groups are exerting any sort of political pressure.

Fuzzy boundaries

As I mention above, Facebook has become an internet hub for me. I love the idea of consolidating my goodreads account and my invitations with Facebook and seeing what people think about the movies that they are seeing.  I mean, why use 10 websites when you can use 1?  Well, for a couple of reasons.

The amount of time that it would take to follow all of these things for all of my friends is outrageous. Actually, the amount of time that I already spend online and on Facebook is pretty outrageous. And the more that I post or repost, the trickier things may get with the accuracy and privacy of my friends, as well.

As these things have begun appearing in my Facebook feed and I have been getting comments on them, I am not sure that I want to put myself out there so much.  Not only are my friendships an interrelated web, but I have varying levels of shared friends, intimacy, and comfort with these friends. These factors are not always related and they are always changing. Partly because I have such a range of friends and I do not want to have the same conversation about X movie with A that I do about Y movie with B.  So I have had odd feeling when seeing a comment from someone that I don’t know very well on my rating of a movie that I saw recently.

Virginia Heffernan writes on nytimes.com:

…Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.” Something happened to this drip painting that he won’t discuss. He said, “Postings that seem private can scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”

Maybe most importantly, the defaults of Facebook are to share everything rather than nothing.  Unless you dig through the settings (which involves being somewhat computer savvy) you will have no privacy and every post from every person and every application will show up in your feed. Do I want to think everytime I rate a movie or mark a book “to read” whether I want all 420 of my friends to see this?  Do I want to be the person that is always nagging my friends with unwanted applications and feeds?  I have recently been spending a fair amount of my Facebook time removing myself from groups and pages and hiding unwanted feeds to reduce the stuff that I sift through. I am hiding friends that I am not close to and blocking the applications that I don’t like.  It will be less work and mess for my friends the more I trim what I am putting out to them.  Am I not networked with everyone (and duplicating the posts of mine that they see) that wants to be on goodreads anyways?

Obligation + Overcommitment = Burnout

I think the nature of being a young, active person in the Bay Area is having too many choices and a struggle with overscheduling ourselves. In this way, Facebook is actually the perfect venue because there are plenty of things that my friends or myself are participating in that have an open invitation to go along with it.  Before I was on Facebook,  I rarely got more than 1 evite per month, but now I get multiple invitations per week and sadly, I end up turning almost every single one down.

I do not like to let balls drop and I do not like to not follow up on correspondence with people, but on Facebook, I have found it nearly impossible to keep my standards of communication up while still being friends with all the people that I have interest in. And I still have the balls in the back of my mind most of the time, S-’s wall post that I never responded to, that message that I never returned, etc…

In 2008, Business Week predicted Facebook Fatigue:

Social network fatigue will set in as people tire of getting yet another invitation from so-called friends to join yet another social network. And, in the wake of Facebook’s fumbled social ads initiative, it will become even more apparent there’s no obvious way to pitch products on these sites without turning off members. Social features will wend their way into all kinds of Web services, from search to news, but the gold rush in social networks themselves will begin to wane.

I think they are a few years too early on this. I think that for most people that I have heard about leaving Facebook it is because they aren’t getting enough out of it or because they are pissed off about something.  I do not yet think that social networking, in general, has worn its welcome. And actually, I think it will probably just continue to evolve in ways that make it more appropriate, secure and manageable for people.  I think that a few key players including Google, Wordpress and Facebook are pioneers for the future of the internet, which will be more and more the way that we manage our lives in the future.

So, I am not signing off of Facebook, although I do not feel trapped, I do feel invested in the virtual world that I have there.  But the conversation is just beginning…