It would be fair to claim that I've been a little hypocritical in my darting around the issues regarding Facebook in the last year or two. This is highlighted by the analysis of my behaviour (!) in Jack Scott's article about why he doesn't use Facebook. My article discusses some issues identified by Jack so I would recommend reading his first.
The thrust of Jack's article is that Facebook is a bad thing and he quotes me providing a number of reasons why this is so. Just in the last couple of weeks I have returned to Facebook, which makes me look a little silly so by writing this I hope to justify myself.
Before I leap into my current opinion it is useful to describe my history with social networking. Near the start of 2007 I joined Facebook for the first time having held off on both it and MySpace for a year or two longer than most of my tech-savvy friends. I didn't have any special reason for avoiding the sites, except that they were closed networks, they appeared to be spreading like social virii and that some of the Myspace profile page colours made me want to tear my eyes out. It was simply an opinion, and by no means a strong one; just a vague understanding gleaned from reading factoids and opinions on the Internet.
I had joined MySpace a little while before, but by that time it was already dying with the hordes moving quickly to Facebook. Facebook of the day had a number of user interface issues which stemmed mainly from its similarity to MySpace. Even though I didn't like the interface, this probably helped them get steal as many users from MySpace as they did.
The emphasis was on individual users' profile pages, which were heavily customisable. You could activate various widgets and arrange them as you liked. The focus of each user's page was the "Wall" where you can leave messages for each other. Beyond that there were thousands upon thousands of gimmicky applications in which you play card games, dress up snowmen or give your friends eggs which hatch into cute animals. These were entirely pointless but they insisted upon cluttering up their users' profile pages and provided some advertising revenue.
Having quickly given up on MySpace I continued to play with Facebook over the next year or so. It was over this time that I learned about some of the implications of social networking. I caught up with a large number of people whom I hadn't seen for a while, some superficially, some not. I also saw people's changing relationship status being broadcast to world, incriminating photos and even had my own boss send me a friend request.
In January 2008 I was attending linux.conf.au in Melbourne, which was a fine congregation of geeks. I found myself in a discussion with some of them about the relative merits and problems, but mostly the problems, of Facebook. On a whim I decided that Facebook was not that important to me and a waste of time so I moved to where there was wireless access and deleted my profile on the spot.
By this time I was more aware of the social, privacy and technical issues in social networking and I was forced to spend some time thinking about them. Some of my friends pressed me for reasons why I no longer had a Facebook account. "Because I felt like it" wasn't a satisfying answer for either them or me, so I did a proper evaluation in my head of what my position was. By the time Jack asked me for my opinion, about which he wrote in his article, I had my thoughts organised and was able to give him a concise summary.
Even though I had convinced myself of the validity of the problems I identified, I wasn't entirely convinced of their severity, or whether they were insurmountable. Talking to Jack about it only increased my doubt.
A scant couple of weeks later I was back on Facebook. I was going to do it properly this time.
Today, I have approximately 100 friends identified. I know exactly who all of them are and would happily sit down and have a chat over coffee with any one of them. My privacy settings are strapped moderately tight---only friends can see my profile, and only friends or friends-of-friends can see photos with me labelled. I mostly use it to post bad jokes on my wall, the same as I do in person, and also to see what other people are up to.
Sometime in my year off they fixed the user interface. Now the main page when you log on is an aggregation of all your friends' walls. That's it, nice and clean. If you click on a user you get a page with their wall, and a tab lets you access their profile information. You have to look in a little sidebar for their applications, those irritating perversions which used to get in your way and eat your bandwidth. Mostly people don't even use them any more. In my opinion it is now actually convenient to use for its intended purpose.
So what was the stimulus that made me finally sign up again? It was an invitation to a friend's birthday party. He had organised the event on Facebook, as this was by far the most convenient way for him to contact the vast majority of his friends. He had gone out of his way to send a special extra invitation to my email address.
I felt a little embarrassed about that. He didn't say that it was inconvenient and there was certainly nothing to stop me attending given the information which was included in the email. As I put it to Jack, I felt like a "pain in the butt" making my friends go out of their way to include me while I was indulging my moralistic, perhaps paranoid views. Having reflected on it a little more it wasn't so much that I actually felt like I was causing annoyance. It was more that I felt like I no longer had a good reason why. So I threw my unproved assertions to the wind and here I am today.
Now that I've made my experiences clear I would like to present my Middle Path. A compromise, if you like, that allows me to use Facebook in good conscience while remaining aware of the problems.
Facebook is a public space. It is incredibly easy to forget this when you're swapping photos with your friends, chatting about things you did that day, and basically hanging out with the same people you do in real life.
On the other hand you'd better be prepared for anyone at all, including your family or even employers (potential employers too) to see anything you see or put on Facebook. There are two ways that this could eventuate.
Generally your more personal information is restricted to those you have marked as friends. If your friends are a hundred people, you can bet that sometimes someone who is not one of your friends will end up on a computer logged on as one of them. On my wall aggregation it's a weekly event to see posts made using drunk friends' accounts. All good fun, but it illustrates the point that your information being restricted to just people you know is a fallacy.
From a more technical perspective, you don't have any control over the information you submit to Facebook. Assume the worst. Crackers might steal all the friendship network data, all the photos and publish anything anywhere. Facebook might make mistakes of their own with your data and show it to the wrong people.
If you understand these risks I believe that you can exist happily and safely in the Facebook world if you're measured in how you use it. If you don't post photos or anything about you, you're not giving up anything. But there is a certain minimum commitment. One inherent set of data in your account is the list of people you care about most, the people you know best: your friends, family and whoever else makes it into your friend list.
You can lock your privacy settings down so that people can't see who your friends are, but if we're assuming the worst, remembering that you aren't in control of this information, you're stuck with giving up who your friends are if you want to be on Facebook.
In my case, I decided that I could live with that. I'm pretty certain that I don't have any private investigators snooping around trying to work out who my friends are, but I have no doubt that there are bots working to collect all the friendship information before we realise that it might be sensitive. However, when all is said and done, I am not a hermit, and it would take minimal observation of me in person to work out who my friends are. So I am happy to consciously commit to giving up that aspect of my life to the public world, even on the Internet.
Once you have taken that step the rest is up to you. If you're not happy for any person at all to see something on your wall, don't post it there. From a technical, logical perspective, that's all there is to it. Why is it not that easy?
I mentioned before that it is easy to forget that Facebook is public. You can be lulled into a false sense of security when you're interacting with people you trust. I have had a personal website for a number of years which has contained a variety of content and when I publish anything on there I know that it's there forever for anyone to see. The Internet Archive drives the point home with their Wayback Machine. It lets you see what a website used to be, going back many years in some cases. Facebook is the same but because it's not just you---you're just there mucking around with your friends---it is forgivable, if unwise, to forget that you're in public eye, even indirectly.
A feature of social networking sites seems to be that people like to inflate their list of friends. I have received a large number of friend requests from people I haven't seen for years, some as far back as primary school. The first time I used Facebook I was almost dazed by the number of people I could talk to again. I didn't have time to catch up with them before, so of course I didn't have time to catch up with them on Facebook either. The nett result was more irrelevant garbage getting in the way of the people with whom I was still actively interacting. Now, the second time, I have rejected requests from people I barely know.
A common complaint about Facebook is that it uses up a lot of time. This is a simple problem which applies to every other toy in the history of mankind. If necessary restrict yourself to looking at it only once or twice a day, or whatever it takes to rein in your rampant online socialising. Facebook is not a drug, but it's possible to get addicted. That's a reason to get a grip on yourself and go outside and enjoy the fresh air, not a problem with Facebook itself. Don't shoot the instant messenger, as it were.
There is one more almost silly reason why I thought I ought to get a Facebook account: to establish my name. It seems rather pretentious to say so, but as the site continues to grow larger, the risk was increasing that somebody who knows me would create a profile in my (unique) name. Whether as a joke or in malice, there's a good chance that the account would successfully make friends with people I know. That's something I simply don't want to have to deal with. I'm there now, so that's not a problem any more.
Overall I believe that I now understand the risks well enough to use Facebook without causing regrets for myself later. My fear now is for those who don't think about it: the people who will share around all kinds of photos, feeling safe, not realising that they may be compromised years later. Some users will become famous someday and their information from social networking sites will become hot property. Statistically that won't happen to most people, but there are other less public situations where someone might want to find information about you which you would rather keep to yourself.
I have intentionally said nothing about the quality of communication that occurs on Facebook. One of Jack's anecdotes is that he appreciated receiving a phone call much more than receiving a quick typed noted on Facebook. I strongly believe that people should meet in person, speak on the phone, write letters and have more binding communication than small snippets flung across the Internet. However, many people my age are using Facebook to communicate so it's my interest here to work out how to deal with it, rather than hope to make sweeping changes to the way the world works.
I also don't believe that Facebook should be a complete substitute for anything. If you are organising a major event, please don't make it centred on Facebook. A website is a good central point, with a group on Facebook to complement it.
If you've read this far, both Jack's article and mine, hopefully you now understand our perspectives on the issues and can use them decide what social networking means for you.
If you're friends with me feel free to come find me on Facebook. If not, either arrange to meet me in person or go away. Have a nice day.
