Oh my word, this lecture is so boring. Who cares about the life and times of Shakespeare when you’d rather be hanging out with your friends? Oh wait, you can see what they’ve been doing anyway — all you have to do is whip out your phone, log on to www.facebook.com, type in your email address and password, and voila! You can see what your friends have been doing all day through the abbreviated news feed and what they’ve written on your wall. And yay! That guy you met the other day invited you to be his friend! Facebook keeps you connected to your friends and distracted from the lecture … perfect!
This scenario, in lecture halls across South Africa, is gaining momentum as students sign up for the internet’s latest craze. Amazingly cool, addictive, social and an atrocious consumer of time, these are just some of the ways to describe Facebook — an online socialising and networking site created by Harvard student, David Zuckerberg, in February 2004. It started out as a social network for Harvard University students, but quickly expanded to other universities and schools.
In September 2006, it was opened to the general public. There are an estimated 21-million Facebook users worldwide and it is the second largest socialising site after Myspace. With its roots in universities, it’s no wonder it is popular with South African students.
According to honours student Bavani Naidoo, ‘life is hectic and it is really difficult keeping up with friends and family. Facebook helps us keep in touch, you are only as far away from them as a post on the wall.” The wall is just one of the many features and allows friends to post comments on each other’s pages. Other features include posting photographs and notes, sending private messages, joining and creating groups and viewing events. Users can grab the attention of others by ‘poking” them and can update and set their status throughout the day, allowing friends to keep up with each other, even though they may not see one another. Friends can also be ‘tagged” in posted photographs and notes.
Facebook profiles can be set on private, so that only approved friends can view a user’s page, making it safe to use. Only when a message is sent to a non-friend or ‘pokes” are exchanged will non-friends be able to view the sender’s profile for one month. Another aspect students seem to like about Facebook is that on each user’s homepage there is a news feed that shows what all their friends have been doing on the site recently.
Naadiya Green says it keeps her up-to-date with who’s around and with what is happening in her friends’ lives. She gets to see how her friends are linked and can build new links.
Dale Ballantine, an Audiovisual honours student, believes that ‘Facebook is really good at networking and connecting people who would never have been connected otherwise”. For Luis de Freitas, a third-year student, what’s also nice about it is that he’s in a long-distance relationship and Facebook makes it so much easier and cheaper to maintain.
Facebook has also gone mobile, making it very easy to keep in touch with friends. Facebook’s mobile interface works really well and is accessible to South Africans.
Not every user has a positive view of Facebook. ‘I hate Facebook. It makes me insanely jealous and full of rage. You should not be able to see into people’s lives like this. It is disgustingly voyeuristic,” says Jack Birch, 21. ‘People are not ‘friends’; they are just a scorecard, the more the better. It destroys the whole meaning of the word ‘friend’,” he adds, although he still logs on almost every day.
With Facebook making waves in the virtual world, we can only question whether this is a portrait of what communication in the future is going to be like.
For Professor Anton Harber, head of journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, however, ‘this kind of social networking is more than just a phase. Sites like Facebook develop over time, but it is difficult to predict where this craze is heading. Social networking sites such as Facebook exploit the real power of the internet. I do not think that Facebook is the future of communication; it is just another tool of communication, among the multiple tools out there that must be embraced.”
Winning the virtual war
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, the company that owns Myspace, let slip a worry that Myspace users are all migrating to Facebook. Below is a comparison between the two competing social networking sites.
Myspace pros
- Personalised designs and pages,
- Personalised graphic comments,
- Blogging facilities,
- View anyone’s profile unless a conscious effort is made to keep it private,
- Random invites,
- Everyone has a ready-made friend in the founder, Tom, as soon as they sign up,
- Easy to stalk people under pseudonyms,
- Has instant messaging,
- An excellent way to promote music and bands,
- Gives people reason to document their lives in photos and videos and share with their friends.
Cons
– Everyone can view your profile (unless you took the time to make it private),
– Designs on pages, while visually appealing, make loading them slow,
– Can only comment on friend’s pages, even though you can see everyone’s,
– Everyone has disappeared and stopped updating their pages after migrating to Facebook,
– Cannot see what friends have been doing,
– Easy for people to stalk you using pseudonyms,
– Never really know if people you are speaking to really exist,
– Not enough happens during a day to spend all day on the site,
– Forever receiving invites from random unknown bands and so-called rising stars,
– Can’t tag other people in photos.
Facebook pros
– Can join networks to link up with others from a certain university, area, school or organisation,
– Can stay on the whole day and get updated news feeds,
– Pro-active,
– Only friends can see your profile,
– Lots of South African celebrities are active on Facebook,
– Excellent for long-distance relationships,
– Can see what people are doing (keep tabs on their every Facebook move),
– Can create and join groups that bring people with similar interests together,
– Can interact with friends by drawing graffiti, throwing virtual food and giving virtual gifts,
– Can create or get invited to events,
– User-friendly,
– Can find long-lost acquaintances and friends,
– It’s mobile,
– Gives people reason to document their lives in photos and videos and share with their friends,
– Get to know people better through photos and notes,
– Can tag people in photos and notes, which they can’t delete.
Cons
– Have to Google the creator, Mark Zuckerberg, as he doesn’t instantly want to be your friend and he doesn’t reply to messages,
– Makes you extremely jealous of the relationships people close to you have with others online,
– Can become an obsession,
– Everyone can see what you’re up to,
– Can’t delete stuff in your profile when people tag you,
– Can only see your friends’ full profiles, but only if they don’t limit their privacy settings. — Jacqueline Holman and Sameerah Dhorat