In Praise of ... Facebook

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?