February 2008     

‘It’s because no one’s about to come over a hill and hit you over the head with the jawbone of an ass.’  - My mother gives her view on our addiction to facebook.   

Time and Face 

Yesterday my colleague was ‘goosed’ on facebook. ‘Goosed?’ I asked, bemused. He nodded solemnly and demonstrated the scrotum crunching move in the air. I had already been ‘poked’ and ‘superpoked’ on the social networking site but this was one step too far.        

If you haven’t yet heard of ‘poking’, don’t be alarmed, it’s quite simple. The ‘poke’ option appears clearly on the menu and with one click your chosen victim receives the exhilarating news that they’ve been poked by you. After a while these poking battles start to get predictable which is why the ‘Superpoke’ application came along to spice it up; the only difference being five letters more to read in your alert box. Well, no one can resist a poke back, can they? Just think about the 55 million active members out there with twitching fingers.

Some users believe they are above the stupidity of the rest and have created a group entitled ‘Enough poking, let’s just have sex’. The fact that the 330,000 members are all still stuck online updating their profiles suggests they haven’t quite understood their own message. Unless ‘let’s just have sex’ is another application I haven’t heard of.

            Admittedly the site offers more than virtual prodding. It also gives you the chance to get really paranoid. A close friend admitted she was a facebook ‘addict’ and said ‘she wished it didn’t exist’. Although the site is banned in the medical insurance firm where she works, Sophie still manages to log-on and off, and on and off, for a couple of minutes each day.

Sophie isn’t concerned so much with her own profile as she is with other people’s profiles. The current love of her life, let’s call him Bruce, is under constant scrutiny. Once in his profile she can feast her eyes on the witless banter exposed on his virtual wall. She knows these posted messages only show snippets of Bruce’s life but Sophie is soon reduced to a panicking wreck, which is a pity, because that girl who wrote on his wall ‘Last night was crazy!’ was probably referring to X-factor results.

Sophie will befriend the new girl so she can keep a close track of her. While doing this she might download the ‘Hug Me’ application to test whether Bruce really cares. Hugging is rather like poking but soppier. This is all done at work so it’s lucky Sophie’s firm has “banned” the site or else she would never get anything done.

 Not all users are quite as dedicated to being miserable on facebook as Sophie but I, a moderate user, have also experienced some emotional turmoil online. A few weeks ago I found myself taking a peep at my ex-boyfriend’s profile. We hadn’t long split up and I should’ve known better. His facebook status ‘relaxed after weekend away’ shocked me so much that I promptly deleted him from my friend’s list.

I came to my senses soon after and told him what I’d done. After a mournful look and shake of the head, he reinstated me as a friend. I’ve learnt my lesson. facebook has made stalkers of many but I’m determined not to be one of them.  

Chris Hughes, the spokesman for facebook says, ‘People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on the site.’ Time-wasting is one of the main factors why facebook is banned in offices along with slowing down the server and security reasons. Luckily for bosses who don’t want to issue bans not all employees are like Sophie.

Katie Miller, working at a government research organisation, tells me that employees are allowed to use the site but since ‘everyone’s a bit geeky they wouldn’t let it get in the way of their work’. Katie compares facebook to a ‘perpetual high school reunion with all the associated anxieties’ and avoids logging on more than once a week.   

Save it, buy it, lose it - time is important to everybody. We want to stretch it out, mould it and move it backwards. Think of the Vodafone advert with all those clock parts falling onto the street. Once I’ve pushed away the thought of someone having to sweep it all up, I connect to Dame Judi Dench’s voice telling me ‘we can make use of every minute of every day’ because the ‘internet is now mobile’. Well I’m sorry, if it means we’re all fiddling about on facebook as we’re walking down the street then that’s hardly making use of time. With a bit of luck we’ll walk straight into a lamp post and wake up.

 We aren’t exactly going to do anything more intelligent online because we’re moving. Sophie will continue cultivating her spy techniques, my colleague will eventually be ‘supergoosed’ and I’ll still log in every so often and pretend I’m cooler than the ‘Enough poking, let’s have sex’ group while discreetly uploading a better picture of myself.

How did this happen? How did everybody get caught up in facebook? My mother, ever the wise one, gives me the answer as she’s unloading the dishwasher. ‘It’s because no one’s about to come over a hill and hit you over the head with the jawbone of an ass.’

And if you’re wondering what that’s got to do with anything, how would you keep face if all you had to wear was a loin cloth?  

Enough said. I don’t know about you but I’m switching off for nineteen minutes.

                                                                                                     The End