Taking on the Facebook Follies

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, May 19, 2010)

“I want to be left alone.” – Greta Garbo, enigmatic screen star of the 1920s and 1930s

People are often surprised to find that I am on Facebook. They assume that I am too cranky and crusty to get much joy out of something so social; they put me down as a curmudgeon who trolls the comments sections of online articles looking to pounce on the grammatically and logically challenged.

I will admit to being often tempted – but when out of every 10 comments after an article, only one shows any sign of rational thought, not to mention proper spelling and syntax -- then the shameless display of ignorance overwhelms and kills any desire to waste time reproving fools.

Now nothing has been more foolish recently than the flap over privacy concerns on Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts are supposedly pushing the boundaries of propriety for managers of an online social network -- all in their attempt to make the Web site they created (or maybe stole, as has been alleged) into a money-making machine.

It seems to me that people who have signed up for a free service – posting contact details, full information on where they work and where they went to school, and an identifiable profile picture – don’t have anything really to complain about.

Facebooker, you have several hundred “friends” – most of whom you seldom see in person or for whom Facebook contact is the first you have been in touch with them in decades -- and you update constantly with “news” about what time you woke up or went to bed, what you had for breakfast, the movie you just watched, what your significant other did that was so awful, how hammered you got last night, your most recent insight into your feelings about your work and your boss -- and you want to complain that Facebook is stealing your privacy?

I am one of the more than 300 million people who have joined Facebook since August 2008, helping to bring the number of users to more than 400 million as of February. Every time I have opened an “app” or a game, I have always received the same warning, that the program will make use of both my and my Facebook friends’ data – and I have never been able to get beyond that point to click “Accept.” I have had to decline the joy of being a Mafia don, a Farmville farmer or the caretaker of some digital pet – because I happen to believe it when a Web site with obvious market research potential and purpose tells me that it is going to be spying on me and trying to glean anything it can from the sort of things I and my friends do.

And it just gobsmacks me that people old enough to know better will pay for the privilege to spend time on these applications and games. I would like to say that it is their own private concern – but it is their concern and the concern of everyone that gets updates on what new level they have reached or what new crisis they are dealing with in their virtual world.

We have been in the digital age now since the early 90s, with early adaptation going back another 10 years, and that’s plenty enough time for everyone – and I do mean everyone – to have learned that nothing done online can be considered private.

Come to think of it, it’s also plenty of time for everyone to have learned not to hit “Reply All” when sending back the snarky reply to a friend’s company-wide e-mail and not to code in all your friends when setting up an evening rendezvous with that secretary who does not happen to be your wife.

But perhaps those are unreasonable expectations when the people who are making the broadest and most insipid use of the newest technologies are the same ones that are daily posting evidence of their untrained and unkempt minds on forums, comment sections and Twitter. No one, it seems, heeds Mark Twain’s advice that “it is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Or people aren’t familiar with Garbo’s expansion on her notion of privacy: “There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.”

The problem is not in the thieving nature of Facebook; it is in the willingness of people to expose themselves completely, nakedly, in an online world for a bit of a laugh.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi