By David Simmons
Good old Henry Ford, he was a hard-working man.
He worked all night and all day.
I said, “Henry, watcha doin’?”
And Henry, he said, “I’m inventing the Chevrolet.”
He said, “I’ve already built twenty-five models,
One for each letter from A to Z.”
I said, “Henry, you fool, there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet.”
He said, “Good heavens, I forgot the Model T!”
– Allan Sherman, “Good Advice”, 1964
Those of us who have never developed or
innovated anything of importance often find solace in disparaging
those who have, finding fault with their inventions or, after
enjoying them for years or decades, remarking their unintended
consequences, and lamenting how much better the world would have been
if these geniuses had, like us, just stayed home and watched videos.
Sometimes this is easy. Weapons
“improvements”, for example, can be seen as evil by nature. Less
clear is how we have or have not benefited from Henry’s
mass-produced Model T, which eventually took us down the road to a
complete revamp of how we urbanize, and how we pollute the planet.
In recent years the world has changed
again, revolutionized by the microprocessor and the personal
computer. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are the Henry
Fords of our era.
Zuckerberg’s contribution, of course,
was Facebook, and oh how we love to hate it. It invades our privacy,
we note (in our Facebook comments), and tries to sell us stuff we
don’t need. It encourages us to form virtual communities that lure
us away from the real world, real relationships with real people.
But like everything else in our “real”
lives, much of our moaning is unimaginative, repeating in
poorly spelled textspeak what our FB friends have already said, or,
if we really get around, what they “tweeted”.
But hooray! A couple of Princeton
University researchers, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, have
given academic body to our fuzzy musings and likened Facebook to an
infectious disease. And like an obsolete bird-flu virus, they
declare, FB will lose 80% of its users by 2017.
Permit me to go off on a tangent for a
minute. One of my pet peeves is “studies” that make precise
forecasts about the future, and even name the date when they will be
proved right. And when that date arrives, does anyone check the
accuracy of the forecast? Never.
End of tangent.
The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi
gave a scholarly explanation of how Cannarella and Spechler arrived
at their conclusion:
The Princeton researchers make their case via epidemiological modelling, acronyms, and lots of formulae where the γI terms in equations 1b and 1c are multiplied by R/N to give equations 3b and 3c. Quite frankly, this means the sum total of F/U+C*K all to me.
All right, we can have fun with this
stuff, but what about the real issue? Is Facebook a positive force in
the universe, or another symptom of the impending demise of Homo
sapiens as a species? More important, as Mahdawi asks, is it
cool?
Cruising through the reader comments
under her piece, there seems quite a bit of evidence that it’s not.
Said one: “Never saw the point of it myself. I couldn’t care less
if a very good friend of mine is having roast chicken for dinner, let
alone a fleeting acquaintance of a friend of a friend. I just find it
a platform for posting about really mundane daily stuff, or showing
off about something. Frankly I couldn’t give a toss.”
But is that really an accurate
description of what most people use this tool for? If so, I would
argue that it’s not the tool that is at fault but the people
wielding it, like trying to build a front porch with a hammer handle.
Out of curiosity, I did an analysis of
my own Facebook friends, of which there are currently 66, about a
dozen of whom are inactive. Here’s the rundown:
Nationalities: 35 Canadians, eight
Thais, seven British, seven Americans, three Australians, two Hong
Kong Chinese, and one each from mainland China, Italy, Ireland and
Germany.
Place of residence: 25 Canada, 17
Thailand, six Hong Kong, four US, two Netherlands, two UK, two
Australia, and one each in Myanmar, Indonesia, Honduras, the
Philippines, the UAE and Italy.
Occupation (some are retired): 36
journalists, five labourers, three NGO workers, three educators, two
webmasters, two retailers, two homemakers, two office workers, one
artist, one DJ, one student, one chef, one photographer, one travel
agent, one food worker, one promoter, and one agriculturist.
Eight are family members, and two I’ve
never met in person.
These people provide me a steady stream
of personal, political and professional news from all over the world
that would have been technically impossible twenty or even fifteen
years ago, especially for a languid sexagenarian firmly and
comfortably seated in his pleasant home in a small town in
northeastern Thailand. They introduce me to brilliant examples of
writing, analysis, photography or art, engage me in lively debates,
and make me laugh. And only one updates me on his weekly roast-beef
dinners.
Our Princeton researchers may be right
that within a few years, in Arwa Mahdawi’s words, “the only signs
of life left on Facebook will be toothpaste brands wondering why
nobody likes them, and Nick Clegg”. But will the cure be as good as
the disease?
