FaceWhat?

Arti­cle I sub­mit­ted to The Guardian. Should’ve worked on it more.

I am con­sis­tently amazed at how my ‘Lexus’ gen­er­a­tion con­tin­ues to growth through tech­nol­ogy (farewell Olive Tree). Cer­tainly, the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of tech­nol­ogy has affected our entire world in ways span­ning from eco­nomic to polit­i­cal and more and more to the social realm. I have had spent a while watch­ing the devel­op­ment of one great exam­ple that char­ac­ter­izes how my gen­er­a­tion responds to technology.

More and more is being writ­ten about the Face­Book, and when one takes a look at the site it becomes appar­ent why. This is cer­tainly a case study for soci­ol­o­gists. I remem­ber hear­ing first about it, and when I responded that I didn’t know what it was, nor was I a mem­ber, I was scoffed at. I then decided I was going to be ‘that guy’ who was ‘too cool’ for this Face­Book. Well, after hear­ing more and more my inter­est finally got me.

When I signed up and set up my pro­file I remem­ber think­ing, ‘why would any­one spend hours on this thing?’ Increas­ingly I found myself spend­ing more and more time on this site. After a while, I real­ized that I had become quite attached to this site; and what is even more amaz­ing is that there is really not much to the site. It is sim­ply a com­mu­nity of col­lege stu­dents (and now high school) stu­dents with pro­file list­ings. It still baf­fles me at the amount of time I can waste at that site. It has become my sin­gle great­est source of pro­cras­ti­na­tion (the blog doesn’t help either).

But then I started to real­ize some­thing: Is Face­Book a dat­ing site? I real­ized this when I decided to take a break from all the hard work at my gov­ern­ment job (cough, cough), and I decided to look at the site. Well, upon my visit it was blocked by the fire­wall, and the rea­son in bold let­ters was that it was in the ‘Dat­ing’ cat­e­gory. Dat­ing? But Face­Book surely isn’t a dat­ing site is it?

I then pro­ceeded upon my quest to fig­ure out whether this was true (can you tell I am overly ana­lyt­i­cal?). I started to real­ize sev­eral things. First, you list not only your rela­tion­ship sta­tus but also what you are look­ing for (dat­ing, rela­tion­ship, etc.). You list sev­eral of the basic qual­i­ties you would find on any other online dat­ing site from age, loca­tion, and career (major) con­cen­tra­tion to inter­ests, favorite books/movies/music, and polit­i­cal views. All of the sud­den, I know quite a bit about some­one else I’ve pos­si­bly never met in per­son. Even the groups that you are in can reveal quite a bit about you.

You can even choose to add another e-mail address, your address, and even your cell num­ber! The Face­Book then becomes a stalker’s best util­ity. I can list courses and find out who that cute girl is in my class to the guy who always asks the stu­pid ques­tions (every class has one). I can do weird things like ‘poke’ some­one, send weird mes­sages, and add friends that either I barely know or don’t know.

So, we now have a socially accept­able dat­ing ser­vice that you can actu­ally get pres­sured into join­ing so your crazy friend can add you. I won­der who will be the first Face­Book ‘suc­cess story.’ I recoil to think about how many friend offers and mes­sages I’ll get over this arti­cle through Face­Book. Come on guys, if you’ve never met me, why are you adding me as a friend?

Whoops, back to that paper I’ve been putting off!