Facing Facebook

As more and more experiences, both socially and professionally, push me toward joining Facebook, I felt like this was a good time to look back on my reasons for holding out and the path that led me to the brink.

How It All Started

The major precursor, in my mind, to the whole Facebook experiment was Friendster, of which I was an early adopter and proponent, and which has now deteriorated to a site where spammers and pornographers try to spread their seed. The main problems with Friendster was that it wasn’t very easy to use, it ran slowly, and didn’t provide enough of an immediate reward for using it. So all of the early users who decided to give it a try slowly gave up on it one by one, leaving me jaded against these types of social networking experiments.

In late 2006, when Facebook opened up to anyone over 13, there was a sudden frenzy of people signing up. You couldn’t have a conversation in Toronto for a good two months without discussing Facebook (In fact, Toronto had the largest Facebook community in the world for a period). Remembering the pattern learned from Friendster, I decided not to join the bandwagon, figuring people would get tired of Facebook once the fad was over and the zeitgeist had passed, and we wouldn’t hear about it anymore. At the time I was also going through a very difficult period in my life and I really felt I couldn’t handle the distractions, needing more real connections and less virtual ones than ever before.

The Holdout

Facebook wouldn’t give up and people kept talking about it. I kept waiting for the hum to fade but it never did. By the end of 2007, Facebook was almost a de facto method of communication among many of my peers, even above email, which astounded me, and often left me in the dark. The difference, I was told, was that Facebook was easy, it just worked, and, the worst and best argument of all, everyone else was on it anyways. I took a look a few times and saw an application that was incredibly well implemented, highly responsive to its users needs, with a good understanding of how the average Internet user would want to interact with others. But still, I did not join.

My reasons had changed somewhat but the result was still a decision not to wade in those waters. The first and main reason remained to avoid a distraction I felt I did not need and that wouldn’t provide enough benefit to outweigh the possible time vacuum it could create.

Slowly over that first year I also watched as others vacillated between obsession and disdain for Facebook, this whole new type of relationship, not with the people it connects you to, but with the software itself. Real relationships in the real world were being really affected through the nuances of the software, from learning your girlfriend is no longer your girlfriend through a status change, to allowing you to vet your new crushes’ friends, to straight up stalking. Conspiracy theories started to surface about how Facebook was actually the perfect government program to monitor citizens from around the world through legal means, which were amusing, particularly since they sounded so plausible. The ugly side was showing.

In fact, Facebook caused many people to even question the very notion of friendship, since the term ‘friend’, in context of the application, was often being conflated with the concept, and emotional reality, of friendship in the real world; a sort of malapropism between a real world friend and a ‘friend’ in the Facebook world. This set off many Facebook haters who would try to point this fact out to anyone who would listen and disparage the whole enterprise as frivolous, deeming any relationship formed through the site as resolutely unreal.

And then, personally, and on top of all of this, there was also the seemingly trivial, but definitely relevant, streak mentality, dictating that since I had held out to that point, why stop now?

Doubt Sinks Her Teeth In

I was pretty content to stay clear of the fray, even taking some pride in it, which would engender a feeling of solidarity with my fellow non-Facebookers, whenever we would come across one another. We would congratulate each other and discuss our relative reasons for not getting involved. Yet.

There was often a “yet” in there because many of us were beginning to understand that the new reality was that staying off Facebook could actually end up costing you in your real life; relationships, jobs, commonalities. Particularly when you’re single, those are the three things you need the most if you want that situation to change.

The Pros

And it didn’t stop there. After returning from a summer of travel, I began establishing fightingtheboss as an independent web development and media studio. I quickly started to realise that if I wanted to purport that I was plugged-in to the online world, that I understood the needs of clients and the consumers of their content, I would need to at least appear that I, myself, am plugged-in and accessible. At the lowest level, it became quite obvious that, like Kanye, I needed to promote myself by any means necessary, including, and possibly particularly, via Facebook.

I was further swayed recently by a timely article by interaction design guru Khoi Vinh, where he made the argument that to ignore these types of social networks as a web professional was to be lax at your job, to not do your homework, to be just plain irresponsible. In some ways, I agreed with his assertion, from the standpoint that Facebook defines, completely, in some cases, how a large chunk of people interact with the web, and being ignorant of those trends could both doom me to repeat any of their mistakes and deprive me from learning from their innovations.

Can’t Beat ‘Em?

So now I find myself standing at the precipice, facing Facebook and the void beyond. It’s like that part in the movie Cliffhanger, where Sylvester Stallone is hanging by one hand off the edge of a cliff and Janine Turner yells: “Don’t Fall!” Like Sly, I don’t need to be told the obvious, but holding on isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Or maybe Janine Turner is the multitude of Facebook haters and letting go is really what I need to do?
(Who knew that movie was so rich with metaphor?)

I’ve never had a beef with Facebook, but I often got a kick out of being on the outside of the whole thing. I was waiting for that caché to pay off, but it looks like it may never happen, leaving me out of the loop and out of touch. Maybe ultimately the old adage is right: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.