Let’s Face the Music and Dance….

Can you remember life before Facebook…. way back in the dusty portals of time, where you carefully selected photos of your travels to add to meticulously constructed group emails, and if you wanted to ‘make friends’ with someone, you would meet them in the pub for a glass of Sauv Blanc and a bowl of chips? Facebook is guilty of introducing new, unnecessary dilemmas to modern life; do I accept my boyfriend’s Mother on Facebook?- (answer: no) is it really wise to tag everyone getting up to no good in the Parklife photos? (answer: also no) and should you really confess to the world on your status that you ‘can’t believe how good the weather is in Tahiti‘ when you are Facebook friends with half the office, and your boss thinks you are laid up in bed with a lesser strain of dengue fever? (answer: oh come on, I shouldn’t really have to tell you….)

Really, Facebook is an insipid pit of voyeurism. It has exacerbated the human desire to catalogue the very minutaie of trivial life and created a platform from which others can snoop and pry, safe in the knowledge that their identity is kept a secret by the anonymity of the web. Gossip has been dredged, affairs have been uncovered, jobs have been lost, relationships have been terminated. Facebook is a panoptican eye; you forget who reads your late night ramblings, you  forget that you accepted the friends requests of Auntie Ivy and Hugh from accounts. And then there is the problem of the impromtu status update. What may have seemed like a wise witticism at 5am pales into self-indulgent melancholia in the harsh light of a hungover day. Like big brother, Facebook’s unblinking eye is always watching. The private is made public- neon light public. Everyone can see the colour of your dirty underwear.

Mark Zuckerberg, the man who unleashed the beast, understands that his evil offspring is somewhat flawed, and he has responded to the identity crisis this week by introducing the Groups function, which allows users to control who has access to what information; protecting you from data related incrimination and allowing, in theory, only the people who you want to see images, status updates and late night lyricism. This addresses the problem of what Zuckerberg sees as the biggest issue in social networking, finding a way to translate the way we organise our social lives in real life online- (e.g the ability to call screen, ‘accidentally’ lose phone numbers or the free will to simply not call someone)… Various problems have been encountered concerning the effectiveness of the Groups function along with further questions of integrity. The Groups function seems to be more of a band-aid solution to the growing problem. Zuckerberg is still far from being the most trusted man in the universe.Nobody knows where they stand with Facebook, the rules about privacy settings are not laid out clearly enough and they are always changing without users’ consent.Perhaps the Groups feature will work to alleviate the problem, but it will never completely solve it.

Another problem is that when personal data was uploaded to Facebook in the old model, it became locked into the website and the user was unable to port it elsewhere. This is really unreasonable. Who is this guy anyway? What does he want with all of our information and what in the hell does he do with it? This week’s Facebook revamp has seen Zuckerberg formulate another ‘remedy’ in the not-so-snappily named ‘Download your Information’ tool, which does exactly what it says on the tin.  Zuckerberg has finally conceded that ‘It is not our information. It is people’s information….. and they should be allowed to take it away if they want.’ Why did this not happen earlier?

I wonder if British Princess Eugenie of York has taken advantage of the privacy setting on the new Groups feature after the recent Facebook fiasco which embarrasingly revealed her to be ‘single and available’ and looking for ‘random play.’ She must make her parents so proud. Pictures of her looking less than regal carrying a packet of fags and looking a little bit worse for wear were recently posted on a friend’s Facebook page. Perhaps it was her somewhat influential grandmother that ordered Zuckerberg to make the changes. I guess we will never know.