Thinking about Facebook

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Facebook just recently. It all came to a head over the weekend.

A year ago I knew little about what appeared to me as some kind of "American thing" when I saw a Facebook profile for the first time. A researcher I was working with for a brief amount of time was all animated about it. "It's brilliant," he told me, "you can keep in touch with all your friends."

What I couldn't bring myself to tell him was that I didn't really feel as though I had enough friends to keep in contact with. And anyway, what was wrong with email or - god forbid - just an ordinary letter.

Of course, as with anything I turn my nose up at with the same dismissive air as though a small creature has died a horrible death right under my nose, it wasn't long before before I submitted to the social networking platform.

Initially I found Facebook was a fun environment to be in. Soon enough people from work started joining up.  We all started making friends with one other, sharing bits and pieces and having a laugh. People who sat only a few steps away from me in the same office were suddenly my friends. We were all having fun. Isn't the internet FANTASTIC?

Then came the inevitable - I started making contact with people from school. Fifteen odd years after I left the place convinced I had absolutely no fond memories, I soon found myself reminiscing about various events and people, cooing when I saw adorable faces proudly holding their offspring with equally adorable faces. Without me even realising, my school history was being rewritten as I looked at pictures and I participated in reasonably excited Facebook message exchanges.

I was insatiable however, sending out friend requests left, right and centre. I dug out people from the past, clamped on to people with the most tenuous of links and introduced all sorts of different people to what felt like a massive virtual party. It was my own little world, something I rather enjoyed, until things started to go a little sour.

In fairness, it's not all Facebook's fault. The past few months have seen my days taken up communicating with people using a variety of different methods including email, Facebook, Twitter and Messenger. I hardly ever use the telephone and in recent weeks, the only people I've been having what might be described as a normal relationship with are the people in the office (that's a total of six, last week reducing to three) and Simon my long suffering partner.

Email, Facebook, Twitter and Messenger all share the same dangerous traits for me. All of them starve me of physical contact. Without having that ability to see someone's face or hear their voice when they're talking, I invariably find myself feeling totally cut off from an individual, interpreting a tone written on a web page, a tone which inevitably is subject to the mood I am in when I'm reading it.

It's a horrible method of communication. I'm starved of the very things I love when I bounce around with people. It's when I bounce around with people that I find my mood lifted and of course, when my mood is lifted everyone else's mood is lifted too. Those who know me well will concur that there's nothing worse than Jon Jacob in a blue mood. It does rather pervade everything and everyone.

These past few weeks it's been getting a whole lot worse. In one day I received 84 emails from one colleague in a different building. Requests for changes to be made mixed in with conversations about all and sundry. We were, in effect, sitting next to each other in a virtual space, conducting our day's interactions solely via email. Sometimes the conversations were heated, sometimes the comments scathing. Occasionally the spelling has been questionable but the bottom line has been the way that electronic conversation causes me to doubt myself, my own sincerity and, at times, the sincerity of others.

It is the most depressing experience. I frequently find myself conducting multiple messenger conversations with people at the same time as responding to emails. When that goes on day after day after day it's hardly surprising my eyes feel like they've been punched and the very thought of engaging with anyone via a computer keyboard in some kind of supposedly fun "Web 2.0 space" suddenly becomes very unappealing indeed.

Where Facebook is concerned, that which I got a thrill from initially - the idea of having a bunch of friends with whom I could share all sorts of silly nonsense - is now becoming something of a source of worry. Status messages are the worst. I fill in status message updates like I butter pieces of toast or make cups of tea. They are moments of self-expression for me. The idea that someone else might possibly read them is totally lost on me. So imagine my embarrassment when, in the space of a week, three totally separate people all comment on how they enjoy reading my status updates "It's good knowing what you're up to - although they have been a little odd of late." Was I developing some notoreity ?

I admit I suddenly became a little self-conscious. Was I, in fact, becoming a Facebook addict? Did other people on "the other side" begin to wonder whether I was in trouble? Did I need to slow down? Did I need to duck out completely? Was there a chance I was developing a negative reputation?

Media-types are indoctrinated almost as soon as they receive their office pass. They're constantly being reminded that they have to "think about the audience" the whole time. Here was I thinking in exactly the same way, wondering what my group of friends *really* thought about me. Some people I never heard back from when I messaged them. What was that about ? Some people left slightly obscure messages on my wall which left me wondering if they were having a go in some kind of weird, sarcastic way. Even compliments on pictures prompted me to go into a spin. Were they being genuine or mean in an indirect kind of way?

Welcome to my world, in case you hadn't realised what world you were in as you read this.

Then, just this weekend, responding to yet another email message of which the tone couldn't be denied (and wasn't by a key jury of people including my mother and father), I logged on to Facebook and learnt of a new friendship forming between two extremely unlikely people. One was someone I really wasn't surprised by, the other caused me to draw breath for a moment. The news that a Facebook friendship had been formed put me into a spin in the same way the sight of my best mate at School giggling with his new-found-considerably-much-cooler-new-mate caused me to feel completely at sea back then.

I sat in back bedroom in our house yesterday afternoon staring out at the gardens down the hill. The sun was out and the breeze was cool. Amid the strange disappointment I felt at learning about this new friendship forming and the conclusions I reckoned I could draw from it - Why were they friends? And if they were friends how could I be friends with them at all? Have I missed something? - I began to realise that there's one thing which is the scariest and most certain of all.

Electronic communication and more specifically Facebook is ruling my life at the moment and that isn't a particularly nice situation to be in. It leaves me feeling as though I'm chained to the computer or the laptop, plumbed in to the internet every second of the day. I don't want to be waking up and thinking about Facebook acquaintances first thing in the morning, neither do I want to be judging myself according to my actions on the network tool or any other form of electronic communication.

Consequently I've started to do some maintenance. If Facebook friends are - as I see them - a little bit like having a permanent party in your front room, then from time to time its necessary to ask them to leave just so that you can get your house back in order and regroup a little bit.

If anything I want to *see* people more. I actually want to interact with people face to face. I'm tired of conducting my relationships with people solely online and having to deal with the aftermath that is interpreting what they *might* have meant with the white spaces or the possibly funny comment. I'm sick of questioning why it is I can never get a response from someone when I message them even though they're on my friends list.

Personally, I feel I need to clear my mind a bit. It's easier to share something amongst 50 people and not worry about how some people will interpret it than it is amongst nearly 300. Such is the effect that a prolonged amount of electronic activity has had on my mind.

So, please remember this. This is all about me. All about self-preservation. I don't want my friendships with people defined by facebook news feeds. If we're not friends on Facebook this doesn't mean we're not friends at all. It just means that I value friendship that much more more that I want to conduct it solely (or as near as possible) in person.

And after all, what did we do before Facebook? We used email and telephones. I rather like the idea of using email now.