Facebook A Digital Country
November 28th, 2010 | by Jen |There is a famous quote that pops up on greeting cards and says something like ”truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave and impossible to forget”. Not any more. These days, it seems the opposite is true.
Thanks to Facebook, truly great friends are only a mouse click away. Difficult to leave? No, just delete them. They won’t even notice because when you cast your net wide it is easy enough for one to slip away. And as for impossible to forget … what was your name again?
Welcome to yet another brave new world, where friendships are conducted in a different language and a new moral code is evolving from the cracked remnants of a bygone era. Facebook, if you have somehow managed to escape its lure, is like a giant online scrapbook for photos, messages and bits of gossip swapped between friends; it is also a goldfish bowl where truths can be distorted and nothing appears real, or, as one user put it, ”a world cocktail party in your living room”.
You can chat with friends and colleagues, trace old school chums and long-lost cousins, stalk your love rival and torture yourself by haunting the web page of a lost love. You can make new friends, form community groups such as Neighbourhood Watch or invite your street to a barbecue without having to step out the door. You can make ”friends” with hundreds of people, including entire companies, which will delight in trying to sell you things. Love it or hate it, there are now 500 million users worldwide, which means one in 14 of us have signed up.
Australia, by the way, is one of the website’s biggest fans; of the 14 million Australians who use the internet in any given month, around 8.8 million (63 per cent) are Facebook users, according to Nielsen Online’s 2010 Internet and Technology Report.
Founded six years ago by the deeply enigmatic and socially awkward Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was initially the domain of hip young things, single satellites strung out across the globe lighting up cyber space with their witty anecdotes and drink-addled encounters, while pinning embarrassing photos on their virtual walls. The minds of the over-50s were thought to be far too sedate to embrace the Zeitgeist.
Wrong! In the last couple of years, the number of ‘’silver surfers” has dramatically increased; 71 per cent of Australian internet users aged 45 to 54 are now muscling in on the social network scene. But if this feels a bit weird, like watching your mum freak out on the dance floor, don’t worry; the over-50s seem to use it in a vastly different way to their more carefree offspring.
Jill Koppell, 54, is a silver surfer (as is the Queen, who signed up a few weeks ago). In the front room of her Abbotsford home, she is introducing me to her Facebook page. As it springs to life on her screen, the world seeps in, small as a golf ball. There’s a posting from her nephew in Vancouver and one from a friend in Austria, as well as messages from friends and relations all over Australia, including one about a pie just coming out of the oven and filling the room with delicious smells. Koppell sighs. ”I don’t know why she is telling me. It’s not like I can share it.”
Koppell is careful about what she shares. ”Young people don’t seem to have any boundaries between public and private life and it comes back to bite them on the bum. They are foolish just like we were; we got pissed on a Saturday night and vomited behind someone’s car; now it would be recorded on someone’s phone.”
A part-time English teacher, she has a select 44 friends and knows them all. I tell her I have four. ”You have to get involved,” she says, ”you get out what you put in.” A lot of her friends are afraid to post; apparently it doesn’t come naturally to anyone past 35. It took her four months to get used to the idea; now she uses Facebook mainly to keep track of what people are up to and to post community-spirited messages.
She was pleased that photos she posted showing the Yarra in flood received several ”like” ratings. A Friends of the Earth supporter, she shares blogs and worthy news bites, but doesn’t do trivia or preen her photograph. ”There’s not much happening in my life that’s interesting to other people. Older people are more circumspect.”
She also likes to share Oscar Wilde-type witticisms and epigrams, a few words, a wisp of a sentence that will echo in the minds of those who receive it.
”I generally think about my audience. I regard Facebook as a public place, so I won’t write about something I don’t want people to read.”
Koppell is crisp and in control; she could live without it, she insists, she doesn’t check it daily, is aware of its virulence and will not let it ravage her life. ”I quarantine it to one room.”
According to Alan Holmes, a researcher at La Trobe University, social networking is about learning a new way of speaking. ”When you grow up in a face-to-face world, it’s an environment that we understand instantly. But the internet is a different animal. It has wider reaches, so it’s a bit like trying to speak again while under water. A lot of people don’t recognise that it has different laws.”