The Fluctuating Face of Facebook

Users continuously find new purposes for the social networking site

You’ve recently been poked, invited to be a zombie or vampire, had some photos of yourself tagged or your wall has been written on. Confused? If so, you’re one of the few people who haven’t become part of the fastest-growing social networking site today known as Facebook.

Facebook got its start when Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg decided that his classmates needed something to help ease the process of socializing in a place he described as “unfriendly.” The use of Facebook has grown into something much larger than a Harvard socialization tool.

After it proved to be a huge success, Facebook was then opened to a few other universities, then all colleges, then all students. Today anyone with an e-mail address can create an account. The current number of users rising to over 39 million shows how much of a success the site has become.

“If I’m at a computer, I’m on Facebook.”

While Facebook is still used for basic socializing, people are finding new uses and benefits of it everyday. Facebook is good for event planning, starting discussion forums on any topic you’d like, selling or buying items online and more. It has even been credited for helping people find their “soul mates,” distant or lost relatives and crime suspects.

CNN reported that after someone was attacked near the Georgetown University campus this past September, the victim took it upon himself to search Facebook, find who he believed the attacker was and took the name to police. Police then investigated, using Facebook as well, and the suspect was arrested and charged.

CNN also reported another story of a Canadian woman who had been searching for her son who she put up for adoption years before. The woman decided to take the suggestion of some of her friends and search for him on Facebook. She typed in his name, searched through a few pages of profiles and found him almost immediately.

SUNY New Paltz is no exception to the Facebook phenomenon and the bizarre situations it creates. The network currently has over 8,000 members and it continues to grow daily.

“If I’m at a computer, I’m on Facebook,” said Matthew Barone, a junior elementary education major and self-described Facebook addict. He further explained his addiction saying that he usually has about four “poke wars” going on, checks his friend’s updated pages constantly, and updates his status regularly. He is also one of the people who somewhat credits Facebook for the beginning of the relationship between him and his girlfriend.

“We knew each other within a group of friends, but not really personally at all,” he said. “After seeing each other a few times, we started poking each other and posting on each other’s walls and it just kind of grew from there.”He’s not the only one who had an unexpected surprise thanks to Facebook. Another SUNY New Paltz junior, Stephanie Falcon, was able to find a relative of hers using Facebook. Falcon is from Long Island and had lost contact with her cousin from Panama for a few years.

Is Facebook simply a supplement to our social lives, or is it in fact changing the way we interact?

“My sister and I were talking because she’s taking a trip to Panama for school, and we started reminiscing about our trips before and how much we missed Alvaro,” she said. “So, on a whim, I just said ‘I wonder if he has Facebook.” She typed his name into the search box, had to search through a few pages of “Alvaro’s” and then found a picture that she immediately recognized as her cousin.

Falcon says that she probably could have just asked her father for some way to contact him, perhaps a phone number, but that she feels more comfortable approaching the situation like this after so many years of separation. She says they definitely speak more frequently now, using Facebook messages or wall posts to keep in touch. However, she was also able to learn that in Panama MSN Messenger is used, so she has since downloaded that and uses it to speak to him almost daily.

The stories continue across campus. Emma Jerome, a senior theater major, was going through some problems in her relationship, like everyone does, and logged onto Facebook one day to receive a message that her boyfriend had canceled their relationship status online. When she confronted him about this she found out that he didn’t want to end their relationship in person or over the phone, so he simply canceled it online hoping that would be enough.

These stories raise the question of whether or not socialization in the presence of Facebook is a new kind of socialization altogether. Is Facebook simply a supplement to our social lives, or is it in fact changing the way we interact?

Before social networking sites a person was required to have a conversation with someone in order to find things out about them, such as their hometown, religion and interests. Now, as long they have a person’s name and both accounts are in the same network, they can learn those things about someone without ever interacting with them.

The process of getting to know someone is now less active and certainly less personal. Why put any effort into getting to know someone new when a "news feed" will do all the work for you? It creates a community where everyone knows about each other, without ever actually having to talk about anything.

Surely the site does help its users, such as helping people get in contact with one another, like Falcon did. Even though she could have looked up a phone number and called her cousin, her first instinct was to go through Facebook. That feeling is representative of many young people these days.

At the same time though it is somewhat unsettling to see just how much people depend on the ease of the impersonal way to interact through Facebook, as represented in Jerome's experience. Could her experience be indicative of the use of social networking sites continuously changing, appearing in new aspects of our lives we did not anticipate?

It doesn't seem as though Facebook will fizzle out anytime soon, so we are only left with these questions while devoted users continue to log on everyday. How large will this phenomenon grow?