I cannot recall the first time I ever heard the word “Facebook” yet the website has a curious drawing to it hoarding millions of users a day. I like to call it “intrigue”. As an overprotected schoolgirl I would throw myself into chat rooms on sites like Yahoo and correspond with random individuals across the globe. Fond memories include a janitor of a school in India trying to be my “friend” and having two cyber boyfriends, one of whom from the USA wrote all the words to the Titanic theme on pink, frilly paper and posted them to me.

Waiting for emails to arrive from across the seas became my reason for getting out of my bed in the morning. It gave me a sense that I was maybe special because “Wade” in Arizona thought I was beautiful. Consequently, reality struck (and my father’s phone bills) and I lay low on the “social networking” side of the web. Until I met www.facebook.com. I often had people asking me “Are you on Facebook?” My disgusted response: “(Snort) NO!!!”

I found it sad that people would spend hours in front of a computer, waiting for someone to slap them around the face with a trout. Yet on a cold, rainy day in miserable July, I uploaded my picture on my profile and told people how I was feeling. And that was me and life as I know it… gone. Life as I knew it was all about to change.
So I am now what you could call “a Facebook user”. I have made friends with people who pulled my pigtails at age 11, fellow school mates and ex boyfriends who cheated on me. Yet with over a couple of hundred friends on Facebook, it is quite hard to keep in contact with each one.

This is where the “intrigue” part I spoke about earlier comes in. A select few friends who offer some excitement and meaning to one’s life are regularly corresponded with. Forget picking up the phone or getting in your car to take them out for dinner. You give them flowers for their virtual garden and wink at them using an application which mimics “bodily movements”. But what happened to the old fashioned “I’ll pick you up at six, dinner’s on me” line. Chivalry is dead it would seem because nobody needs to be chivalrous anymore. Social recognition is at one’s fingertips, literally as all you need is to move the mouse and type to be a complete social butterfly.

And with Facebook, stalking seems to be an inevitable problem.
More disturbing is the false sense of security one gains from Facebook. A girl who I fell out with at 14 is now my friend on Facebook. Having not spoken for over 10 years we now post funny pictures to each other. It would seem that a mutual understanding has been (falsely) created.

Out of the many friends that people collect into their “friends” stash, how many do they converse with regularly? Maybe 10%? The other 90% smile happily and are ignored. I myself have been victim to the “hey! I borrowed that girl’s lighter when I was in the queue for the loo at such and such a club! Lets be Facebook friends!” trend. This is followed by a description of how we were in the CIA until 1969 when we left to join a commune of hippies in our “how we know each other” column. It alarms me that when I meet up with my circle of friends, the one topic which always rises to the front of the conversation is Facebook. We are on the site all the time when we are apart and now we are spending time together in reality, we can only talk about a representation of reality.
Facebook may be an incredible social networking tool, but it is keeping us from the fundamental part of being sociable: spending time with people.

Communication may be occurring through Facebook but does facial expression count for nothing anymore? The world seems to be getting smaller and smaller. I poked a relative in the UK yesterday and I didn’t get on an aeroplane and fly 2000 miles to do it. I did it in my office! Distance, time, and mutual hatred seem unimportant and irrelevant when it comes to the Facebook race.

One hopes that this will not progress to a stage where communication in the present and physical is not needed. Upon starting Facebook, a friend of mine at work waved her finger at me and said “watch out for that site, you’ll lose your entire life to it”.

Maybe I should have listened.