WHY I HATE AND LOVE FACEBOOK

You may know I publish my own physical zines from time to time, including poetry, music reviews and general comment…? Well, not long ago I put out a little pocket-sized publication of short, random writing. Here (below) is the introduction to the zine which, as you’ll  find out, has a lot to do with a fairly popular networking website…

When I joined facebook in April 2009, it was with a weary sense of the inevitable. Once again I was following the flock and buying into the latest over-hyped media trend.

I’d held out quite a while, telling myself I was an individual and not prey to the need for approval that motivates the average fb user. There were other reasons too – I felt I had to register my contempt for an upstart-ish corporation that had to be resisted purely for its overnight dominance. Add to this the fact that I was very much a 20^th century boy, wary of learning a new interactional game, and that blue logo looked distinctly unattractive.

What swung it for me (or at least what I told myself swung it) was the reputed power of facebook as a promotional tool. Other artists were adopting fb because of its potential for building a community of fans and keeping in touch with them. All of this had previously been true of myspace of course, but the unassailable logic these days is that you have to be where other people are…so, follow the flock.

Once I joined, I soon discovered the primary function of facebook, which most people spend most of the time using. I’m talking about the exchange of content on timelines; the constant flow of amusing ephemera that shortens your attention span and prevents you from settling down into deep concentration.

What is it all about, this drip-feed of dribble, this frivolous foam of ‘epic fail’ videos and drunken poses? What is it actually FOR? Ten years ago nobody had thought of it; now they can’t live without the ‘breading cats’ meme.

For artists, the trick is somehow to plug your promotional machine into this trivia maelstrom and ride the waves of endless sharing as your clip goes viral.

I soon became disillusioned with facebook, not just because my army of fans failed to materialise, but because of a suspicion that the site just wasn’t good for me.

Facebook preys on peoples’ need for status, encouraging them to present themselves as more witty, popular and successful than they really are in the hope that more people will want to interact with them.

If your social networks in the real world are shaky, you are easy prey for the phantom self-esteem that glows inside you with every notification on your profile.

With increasing numbers of people living alone, working from home and staying in at night, facebook is a comfortable but distant social club where you can stay in your dressing gown and scratch yourself.

The flipside of that fleeting recognition-high is the wretched emptiness when your latest witticism is ignored, and you realise the truth of what you’re actually doing.   

It’s just the same with artistic recognition. The constant pursuit of ‘likes’ on a band page is no more than a feel-good fetish. After all, 303 people might say they are coming to your gig, but only 3 might actually mean it. 

Ultimately, the site sucks us in. It needs activity from us so it can mine our data for advertising cash. This is what we are FOR. We create the content in this collective soap opera (for free!).  And we are certainly putting the time in – research has shown that people are regularly spending over five hours a day on social networking sites, a phenomenon that pathologists might see as a mass addiction.

In a way, all we are doing is what we already do when we present ourselves in public – we aim to maintain or improve our status, however that’s defined. Mark Zuckerberg’ genius was to work out a way to make billions from that.

Having sneered at fb from a distance I now had to sneer at myself for being taken in by it. But it wasn’t all bad. The chains of wit that result from a single comment can be life-enhancing. And after a while I realised that the status update was offering me a forum for the broadcast of everyday thoughts and reflections, fostering a kind of writing that hadn’t come out in quite the same way before. These spontaneous offerings seemed to be appreciated and along with a few other friends I felt I was at least helping to make facebook a creative space.

The pieces in here were either written spontaneously as status updates or ended up being shared shortly after writing.

I remain ambivalent about fb, and take holidays from it from time to time. But I continue to use it, because I have the same needs as everyone else – the need to express myself and be heard.

Like it or unlike it, It seems that facebook will only leave the scene when we have beaten our addiction to one thing – status.

Face ‘n’ status is available from Liverpool’s independent bookshop News From Nowhere or email spooneditor@hotmail.com for a free copy.