For us, the year is 2014, but for diehard fans of Facebook, it is 10 AF, meaning 10 years after Facebook. I had heard a lot of negative and positive aspects from people using this social medium, but the most touching story I read about it was ‘Mom’s Facebook quest ensures her lonely son won’t be alone on his birthday’. This was the story of a lonely fifth-grader, Colin, from Richland, Michigan, who struggles with social skills. He told his mom that there was ‘no point’ in having a birthday party for him because he didn’t have any friends.
But thanks to his mom and Facebook, he now has more than one million friends. Colin’s mom Jennifer created an FB page for friends and family to send him their wishes. She had no idea that the simple request would grab the attention of 1.3 million people around the world. I always thought there are two kinds of communities in this world.
One is where people shut their doors and windows if someone is in trouble outside on their street. And then there are communities where all people come out on the street to ask about the problem and help out the victim. FB, I think, is a community of the latter kind. My theory was proved right when I read a story about a teenager who said on FB that he has no hope and was planning to commit suicide. Within minutes, people started sending him messages and talking to him to get him out of that mood and mode. But then we have also read stories about teenagers bullying an emotionally vulnerable boy who became so fed up and cornered and insulted that he committed suicide. So basically FB has been similar to a knife that can save lives in a surgeon’s hands and can also take lives if it is in the hands of a murderer.
But there is no doubt that over the past 10 years, this social medium has affected our lives in many ways. Paul Saffo, a longtime Silicon Valley futurist, says, “The biggest impact of Facebook was that it broke us out of e-mail jail. E-mail implied you had to reply, Facebook did not. E-mail is formal, Facebook is a salutation. E-mail you send, Facebook you broadcast. It’s simply a new social medium for which we’re still learning the social norms.”
Cyberspace offers endless resources for email, instant messaging, sharing our personal news, photos or locations and catching up on news. The ever-expanding Facebook (it just bought Whatsapp) offers all of that, as well as your friends, in one convenient location. Facebook is also your Internet portal — just like AOL in olden days, but with a better business plan. Plus, it is mobile.
But the problem is that Facebook has turned some emotional ordinary citizens into untrained journalists and sometimes into news analysts and political pundits who push their point of view as if it is the sole truth in the world. Anyone who disagrees becomes their enemy. Proofless opinions such as “Modi is a fascist”, “Rahul Gandhi is naïve and a reluctant prince”, and “Kejriwal is a Naxalite” are being pushed day and night. I know two very good friends who were turned into strangers by FB. After one kept on posting pro- Congress comments and the other pro- BJP, they were not even on talking terms.
Facebook allows people to connect over long distances and reconnect over long lost years. Your neighbourhood where you grew up may be but a memory,but it could come together once again on FB. Prior to FB, ex-friends and lovershad to work hard to reconnect because phonebooks were no help in finding changed names or cross-country moves. Now, all it takes is a wistful thought on FB and it can easily lead to a friend request and a reopened past — even if the recipient prefers it vacuum-sealed.
Businesses that literally bank on our personal info (by selling it to advertisers) also subject people to continuing loss of privacy. But as Edward Snowden, Europe and history know, that rarely turns out well. And yet, here’s FB, whose CEO until recently described anonymity as a ‘lack of integrity’. The world’s largest social network is also the biggest influence on the Americans about their attitude towards surveillance in their country: What’s the big deal, they say? We’ve already willingly sacrificed our privacy to FB.
But then FB is also responsible for getting the Boston bomber arrested within hours after the explosion because people who were recording the marathon on their cameras had put up pictures of the people in the vicinity of the explosion minutes before it happened. In 2012, when an earthquake decimated Haiti’s capital, a spontaneous rescue center appeared on FB, with users posting the quake updates at a rate of more than 1,400 per minute. I understand that rescue agencies regularly use Facebook as an effective platform following disasters.
Yet more than a billion members later, it is difficult to say if the world’s largest social network were to disappear tomorrow, whether the lives of most people would change much, if at all. Nearly every service on Facebook is now also available elsewhere. But then we should not forget that losing Facebook means losing the No 1 place where we can complain about, what else, Facebook.
(Author/news analyst Ravi M. Khanna is a former South Asia bureau chief of Voice of America who now does freelance reporting from New Delhi)
Feedback: ravimohankhanna@gmail.com
