Facebook is a stalker's paradise. It provides users with the unique ability to chart the dramas, relationships, beliefs, interests, travels and traumas of their old flames, future loves, friends and enemies alike.
So where does this popular online community stem from? And what is the real draw behind the html?
From Hotmail to Facebook: Development of Online Communication
Hotmail – it was the buzz word of the 1990s. A new era of communication akin to Orwell’s doublespeak, in which ‘lol’, ‘brb’, ‘rofl’ and ‘cya l8r’ replaced what had previously been known as the English language. It was in this new society that ‘hot_girl15’ flourished, RSI emerged as a serious concern and ‘@hotmail.com’ became a necessary suffix affixed to each unique designation. The world appeared to be undergoing a drastic transformation that would signal the start of an enlightened ‘email era’.
Cut to 2008 and a very different picture has emerged. What was once believed to be a liberating force in the communication sphere is now more likely to be described as restraining, traditional and largely defunct. A new and more powerful force has well and truly taken over as the hegemon of the online community.
Created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2003, this novel social networking phenomenon is today worth upwards of $1 billion.
Yes, in the closing years of the decade, it’s time to bid Hotmail a sad final farewell, and succumb to the all-consuming authority of Facebook.
What is Facebook?
So what exactly is this online phenomenon that has taken the global community by storm?
According to Wikipedia, Facebook is ‘a social networking website that allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information’.
A working definition? Perhaps. Yet such a technical explanation appears lacking when attempting to understand the vice-like grip held by this formidable website over its 58 million followers.
Today, Facebook is not only a matrix of individualised web pages. Nor is it an example of traditional online communication and networking. Rather, Facebook is an Internet recreation of the real world – a constellation of individual lives and actual emotions that have been translated into an html format.
Allowing for the installation of over 9000 free add-on applications, the community allows members to do everything from comparing the ‘attractiveness quotient’ of their friends, to mapping out their travel destinations, to borrowing and managing money online.
Facebook Stalking: The True Guilty Pleasure
So is Facebook really the end? Will this website signal the beginning of a new global population, whose primal existence takes place not in the physical world but in the realm of megabytes, memory and html? Is this what the future of communication holds?
For 19-year-old University student Annabelle Chafer, the answer is not so simple. “It’s more like a way to check up on what everyone else is doing. Even people who you don’t really know or who you’ve only met once – you can find out all about them by just clicking on their profile.”
In this respect, it seems that the primary draw of Facebook lies not in its ability to map out human relationships and real lives. This constant rhetoric about social networking and online connectivity fails to encompass the true guilty pleasure behind the phenomenon – the possibility to ogle the lives of others with an all-seeing yet completely anonymous eye.
Put simply, Facebook the Big Brother of the 21st century – a relentless telescreen that anyone who is ‘online now’ may or may not be watching.
The intrigue lies in the mystery and, if this mystery were ever violated, Facebook would no doubt be abandoned by its minions. After all, whilst its 58 million members are more than happy to publicly broadcast their mobile phone numbers, email addresses, daily activities and personal photo albums, there is one area in which privacy must reign supreme – cyber stalking activities must never be revealed. The mere suggestion of being able to track profile visitors would no doubt create uproar in the online community, ultimately resulting in Facebook being forced to join Friendster, Hotmail and Xanga in the online ghost town of ‘has-beens’.
Facebook: A New Definition
As both an arena of social networking and a means of escaping real life, a haven for exhibitionists and voyeurs alike, Facebook is an online community that encapsulates the dual nature of humanity. An online second life that enables members to step into an overly dramatised character, yet be masked by the anonymity of communication online.
Markoff, J 2007, ‘The tangled history of Facebook’, International Herald Tribune, 31 August.
‘Windows Live Hotmail’, Wikipedia, 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail#_note-freedom
‘Facebook’, Wikipedia, 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
Facebook, 2007, www.facebook.com
