courtesy of jmorganmarketing.com

I am a notorious Facebook procrastinator. I can lose hours of my day scrolling over the news feed, absorbing superfluous information about my friends, workmates, family members and other people who I’ve encountered some time in my life. For instance, I just found out that my cousin likes “eating quick oats with nothing else!!” and that a guy who I used to go to high school with likes to snort cocaine while drinking Smirnoff on the weekends. Too much information? Probably. But that’s not going to stop me from poring over their profiles, photos and wall posts, consuming any random data on their personal lives. Facebook is like an online social encyclopedia and I’m an avid reader.

Facebook, which was launched on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg is a social networking site which consists of a teaspoon of Twitter, a pinch of Friendster, a cup of MySpace and a sprinkle of Live Journal. In other words, its basic format and functions are similar to other social networks which allow the user to participate in a virtual community and ‘share’ information about his or herself whether it’s through updateable status bars, photo albums and applications. The use of ‘chat boxes’ and instant messaging which were added just last year also enables the user to have a conversation with another user who is simultaneously online. The avenues for information transmission and receiving are therefore multiplied, enhancing an authentic sense of virtual interaction which at times, is incommensurable with that of physical contact. You could be posting a monologue about your hopes and fears in life while commenting on your friend’s photos of drunken debauchery as well as instant messaging another about your plans for the weekend.

“Facebook Overload” is a phenomenon that is sweeping us under its wake, turning us into inadvertent ‘virtual voyeurs’ at the click of a mouse. We can potentially find out anything about our friends and acquaintances on its icon-filled pages and be actively social without actually leaving the house. Its existence underlines the very notion of satiating human curiosity and even though we pretend not to want to know or care about what our friends at x o’clock in the early morning, we like to comment on their status anyway. We, the generation of the Information Age participate in the idea of immediacy and instant data, which in turn perpetuates an excessive information gratification that we take so easily granted.

Knowing me, knowing you

According to the website, “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”, which makes its global community of users sound like an army of social butterflies who have the ability to bring the world together. Statistics also show that there are over 200 million active users who between them spend 3.5 billion minutes on Facebook each day and that more than 20 million update their status on a daily basis. Keeping that in mind, it’s easy to imagine the amount of ‘social connections’ that can be made on a per second basis, let alone the rate of personal information transmitted at alarming speeds. Although such a motto addresses the concept of establishing multiple relationships and enhancing a sense of utopian interconnectedness, it can also be seen to diminish such relations into triviality. For example, I admit to being guilty of accepting friend requests from people who I don’t actually know but have met, and perhaps never meet again for the rest of my life. I also have friends who have more than 500 ‘friends’ on Facebook, leaving me to question how many of them they actually know and remember. So while such a popular social tool is effective in generating these ‘connections’ with acquaintances or people who you share variable degrees of separation with, it focuses more on horizontally broadening a community rather than deepening it. The lack of interaction with these so-called Facebook buddies in real life is somehow compensated for virtually, even if that just means ogling their photo albums and perusing their wall. Users become expert virtual voyeurs. Social networking sites are great at proliferating connections and disseminating personal information and Facebook is a leader at ‘getting to know you, getting to know all about you’ without actually knowing you. So is that a good or a bad thing?

Face it, you’re a stalker.

We’re all familiar with Facebook stalking and there must have been at least once that we’ve engaged in the guilty pleasure of uncovering information about somebody we ‘kind of’ know. “Facebook stalking” can be defined as the seemingly harmless act of following another user’s profile (i.e. reading their wall and conversations, checking out their photos) and basically gleaning any information that tells you about this person’s identity. In this case, information overload signifies the capacity for a user to investigate another and at times, becoming privy to intimate details about the other user’s personal life without him/her knowing it. Depending on what you’ve decided to make public on your wall, this can range from your date of birth, sexual preference, and relationship status to your contact number as well as more specific details, like what you’re doing right now and what you’re planning to do. If you’ve also completed one of those ‘notes about me – 25 personal questions you to have to answer truthfully and tag ten other people’, then hell, your supposedly private life and history is on a platter for the virtual community to peck at.

Pete Wales, a 22 year old Communications student who also knows what it’s like to squander hours on Facebook when he should really be doing his essay, points out the entertainment factor inherent in the social network. “It’s like following a soap opera sometimes, you find out about their relationship with another person, whether they’re having a tough time at work or if they’ve gone travelling, that sort of thing. You can find out how they’re feeling or what they’re up to via the messages their friends post on the wall”. Being a member of Facebook makes you the star protagonist in your own narrative that can be followed religiously by an often, undisclosed group of fans. The irony lies in the fact that the user ultimately has the discretion to provide this sort of information publicly and restrict or publish content according to how they’d like to virtually appear. In this way, information overload on Facebook has the capacity to make its users characters in their microcosmic dramas as well as turn them into shameless stalkers at the same time.

Meanwhile, Sylvia Tang, a 20 year old Law student who also has a Facebook account claims to “check it probably three times a month and only to see what my friends are up to and whose birthdays are coming up. There was a period where I used to go on, like every day, but I got over that when I figured it was just too much”. For those who are seemingly disenchanted with its excessive promulgation of personal data, Facebook is simply reduced to an overcome phase that is only occasionally visited for virtual catch ups and fill-me-ins.

Bringing it down to identity

If Facebook is indeed a massive digital interface with a vast collection of individual ‘faces’, then it ultimately becomes a global platform for showcasing personal identities. That’s not to say that all users create profiles that essentially mirror their true identity in reality. The term ‘pseudonymity’ which recognises the difference between the public identity of an individual and his/her online persona shows that Facebook is more than a social networking tool, but a site that facilitates the creation of an authentic digital reality and the pluralisation of human identities. The user is then able to construct an online persona that doesn’t necessarily reflect all elements of their ‘true’ self but instead allows for the emergence of a ‘virtual identity’ which corresponds with their public persona.

Facebook is ingenious in how it so craftily allows us to sell our ‘individuality’ to the immense virtual community. All you need to do is look at the applications and quizzes which desperately ask you to assert who you think you are– What city should you live in? What kind of colour are you? What type of body part are you? There are also applications which compare your taste in films/music/partners etc. with other users, as well as a delightfully alienating one which lets you rate and rank your friends according to how special (or not) you think they are and vice versa. The virtual visualisation of your ‘face’ or your personal essence is manifested on Facebook’s walls where as a user, your personal information has been stylised to a very virtually consumerable format. Nothing like a social networking site with its myriad of applications and showy need to document your activities to remind you that virtual identity is a performance; and if you use the right colour scheme and format, can also be an aesthetically pleasing one.

Although this depicts Facebook’s power in evoking the existence of a multifaceted identity in the digital era, it can also confuse the dichotomy which separates what is ‘real’ with what is merely ‘virtually real’. Identity thefts and frauds have risen in concordance with such social networking sites especially with users manufacturing fictitious profiles and adopting virtual identities in order to manipulate other users for criminal purposes. For example, the British consumer-watch program, Watchdog in 2008 reported on the scarily easy way a user’s details such as name and date of birth on Facebook was used to obtain a bank account and credit card under the person’s identity. The ramifications of information overload on Facebook can lead to the malicious acquisition of data that can be used against its members; completely shattering the ethical barriers which divide truth from fiction. Information complacency in the digital world has a cost. And it could be your identity.

Facebook addresses the neo-politics of the digital era, transforming our generation of the information rich into social engineers who have the power to virtually shape and alter how we portray ourselves, including our social relationships. It has been quoted that “the internet would free us of the burden of our public identities so we could be our true, authentic selves online”, and rightly so. Facebook is so important to its users because it establishes a virtual space and mobilises a social reality dependent on the inundation of personal information to validate their virtual identities. The only problem is that often the virtual realm eclipses the greater public realm, dangerously conflating such disparate spheres into a single reality where access to online data becomes the key to one’s overall identity. However, We, the spoilt generation of the Information Age are clever enough to convert information overload into something that we can voyeuristically engage and relish in, as well as use to assert our virtual individuality online. We are Facebook.