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Half the world is on Facebook. User growth grinds to a halt at about the halfway mark in every country. In the UK, we're at about 48.75% of the population. To the young though, who from 18 – 34 years make up half of the UK's Facebook users, it feels like all the world is online - a feeling somewhat exacerbated when your mum starts cheerily popping up in your newsfeed.
This sense of an ubiquitous force could explain the motivation behind the apparent Facebook fascination of young people, after all as we've been taught throughout school, peer pressure is everywhere, and we all just want to look cool.
Admittedly, our Facebook fanaticism could be more simply due to the fact that we young social things have grown up with the net and are confident with it, and we are using Facebook purely for its innocuous, ostensible purpose of social networking. We're just making friends. Sure, in physical practise it's a solo, closely-knit occupation between me and my laptop, but, as Facebook-the-company is keen to stress, emotionally it's all about bonding with other people.
A recent study has announced that a correlation exists between those who have a high number of Facefriends, and the size of the social areas of their brains. Maybe Facebook really is just a display of our uncomplicated desire to interact with others, increasing our very capacity to bond. But correlation does not equal causation. A desperately scraped-together AS in Biology was able to teach me that at least.
The study is careful not to draw conclusions from this evidence along the lines of 'Facebook actively improves sociability.' As I imagine it, people with a thousand Facebook chums must be at least a little bit more gregarious than average in Real Life to have met enough people to be able to boast that many friends, (including friends of friends, and their friends, and some cousins, distant ones. And some of their friends too). So yeah, the extra lumps of socially-buzzing brain in these people might have been, and probably were, there before they even got to Facebook.
Call me a cynic, but I'm inclined to suggest the pull of the site is a little more self-involved than a sweet desire to make cyber daisy-chains with the other girls from school. It's a little more introverted, a little more narcissistic. We use Facebook, at least in part, to massage our egos and promote ourselves. A touch, in our mundane, anonymous and ever-growing, fame-obsessed world, of self-celebrity.
Seeing inane unrelenting statuses about which brand of cereal Sophie chose for breakfast, which coat Mark decided to buy, and which toenails Kelly is currently clipping slamming down my newsfeed always did serve as evidence towards a sneaking suspicion that humans are inherently egocentric, and that Facebook is the ultimate platform for this dark side of human nature. But the recent additions of Spotify and The Guardian in the newsfeed, regaling me with the fascinating news of what my friends are listening to and reading right that second, ultimately crushed my faith in the website completely.
Those that make these posts don't really think these tiresome details will interest anyone, but it interests them for us to know them. We are willing to ruefully admit to 'Facebook-stalking', yet who is willing to stand up and say I spent a good two hours last night shamelessly self-promoting for the glorious gratification felt when someone I hardly know liked that utterly hilarious YouTube video I found?
It is competitive. We are all engaged, thoroughly subscribed, to the self-promotion – we are given boxes to fill in all about ourselves, encouraged to choose a not-quite-lifelike glossy snap via which we present ourselves to the world. We are well aware that our witticisms are read by loads of people we don't even know, and that gives us a total buzz. We hardly notice, if at all, what we're doing, because it's one giant egg and spoon race where we're all so determinedly concentrated on our own egg, that we barely have time to glance around and see that no one is looking up from theirs either.
We're in it for that pull of the little red bubble displaying a new notification that sucks us back every time: we are rewarded for our narcissism and we love it. We're all vaguely aware that Facebook-as- company is utterly dubious in terms of how it stores and sells the info we give it, and recently an Austrian law student Max Schrems has become the first to properly face up to this, beginning legal proceedings to tackle it: a case dubbed Europe vs. Facebook.
But as for the rest of us, we on the most part won't ever bother to look too deeply into it. We're too busy desperately selling ourselves to our friends to notice or care that Facebook is equally busy selling us to advertisers. Because the company has got us, hook, line and sinker. It has tapped into the most deliciously addictive thing we all possess: ourselves.
What a well-written article, and scarily true.
Really good piece. Hopefully Max Schrems will win. The idea of 'shadow profiling' is rather sickening.
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