How Has Facebook Impacted Your Life?
Amidst the ongoing hub-bub about Facebook’s partners’ misuse of our personal data, my friend Christopher asked a simple, but certainly not simplistic, question the other day:
“How has Facebook impacted your life?”
Here is my first-draft response.
I’d love to see your answers too.
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Christopher,
I’m going to go ahead and say that Facebook has impacted my life in a profoundly positive way. Back in 2007/2008, they billed themselves as a “social utility”. I’ve always liked that language, because that’s precisely how I like to use it: As a utility, or means, to accomplish the end of staying in touch with folks.
Now: Like any utility, it has its relative strengths and weaknesses. Electricity makes for a poor means of heating a home. And it’s hard to imagine a diesel-powered dental drill. In that vein, Facebook is *horrid* at curating relationships with my top 20 closest relationships. Those people deserve my full, undivided, and undiluted self. I feel like fb has weakened my discourse with my closest friends because the time I invest sustaining written relationships with my audience* (i.e., friends 21–2,000) finds me lacking the social energy to repeat myself to my core friends. As a result, I figure my relationships with that core has suffered a bit.
In short, I believe fb has radically broadened my reach and ability to stay connected to folks 21–2,000 at the expense of people 1–20.
*About that choice of word (i.e., audience): I believe fb has given those of us who fashion ourselves as creators a platform to build an audience. You, Christopher, like me, are a writer. A muser. We are the 1% of fb users who see fb as our personal Dave Barry column. Our own McSweeney’s. For folks like us, Facebook has created a place where we can be (eye-roll ahead) “public figures” within a relatively gated community of our own choosing. Not celebrities on the level of a Christopher Hitchens, but micro, no, nano-celebrities of a sort among our own social network. I suspect that for folks who actually use this platform to write novel content, Facebook has been of GREAT value. A place to test thinking, share perspectives, and try to add value (e.g., humor, perspective, etc.) to the lives of those we care about.
Then you have the 9% who don’t *create*, but instead circulate. The sharers. Yesterday’s chain-email forwarders are today’s “sharers”. Some do it to evangelize a world view. To signal virtue. Others to passively aggressively provoke. Most probably do it because it’s simply an order of magnitude easier to promote than produce. This group, I think, finds a little less value in fb. As the echo in the echo chamber, their needs are less discriminating.
The remaining 90% of facebook users spend their time reading & commenting on the 10% above. They, too, find a different value prop here. This is, presumably, the group that could just as easily be reading (and commenting on) content at the The New York Times, or Slashdot, or Medium, or whatever. For that group, fb is of significantly less… (back to the beginning) utility. It’s a content source like any other. With kid pics and jedi-level-surveillance tossed in for good measure.
In short, Facebook has been useful to me to me because I’m a writer, an expressive, and a high-self-monitor. I enjoy the idea of an audience, but a trusted/vetted audience of my choosing who therefore comes to my content armed with context about its author.
How about you? How has Facebook impacted your life?
