Facebook: Making The Past No Longer A Thing Of The Past
By Shamako Noble, Silicon Valley De-Bug
December 15, 2009
It used to be the case that when you would graduate (or drop out) of high school or college, you would leave a job or some staple of your life or a city and when you did, you left behind all of things that came with that experience. That might have been your friends or your family, that might have the activities and groups that you loved, or it might have been the past that you were very intentionally trying to leave behind.
Well, Facebook has most certainly challenged that notion and it may in fact have altered the nature of our ability to simply, “move on.” In a world that keeps us informed to the point of knowing someone's dinner, schedule for the week, and relationship status, it's hard to hide anything from anything, especially yourself.
My personal experience has most certainly been kind of a trip for me. For a long time I ignored Facebook, which is sort of hypocritical since I'm a big fan of the importance of social network theory and its impact on our society. To be frank, I had simply convinced myself that I was too busy to deal with it, even though I knew that it could be useful for events that I was promoting or things of that nature. I'd received all sort of different advice about using, and even tried to utilize the technology of Facebook and Twitter spontaneously, but it didn't fully work out the way I had hoped.
Then, in the months of February and March, something very interesting happened. Twitter use started to climb dramatically, which some speculated to be connected to the rising unemployment rates. This was never verified but one thing was for certain, technologies like Twitter and Facebook, which allowed more real time coverage of life and communication were growing exponentially. Around August, I decided to stop being stubborn and take the advice of all my friends and colleagues and started dragging my behind online to “connect with others.” I never could have been prepared for what happened.
Initially the technology from Facebook began connecting me to the other folks I knew were online. I started searching for those I could remember to search for and they started to pop. Over time, though, it started to grow more dramatic. Suddenly, Facebook was introducing me to people from my high school, my elementary school, college, virtually any job I'd ever worked at for any period of time. Following came my brother, my mother, my sister, my cousins from both sides of the family. Almost anything I could imagine. Somehow the word was spreading and Facebook, a technology designed almost exclusively for students, was connecting me to every part of life that I wanted to be connected to.
At one point, the reconnection to everything made me feel overjoyed. Then, I started remembering everything. You see, being face to face with almost every aspect of my life brought me into contact with what has become a relatively cold reality of Facebook and social networking technology in general. If there's any truth to the concept of “out of sight, out of mind,” then Facebook has brought us square to the doorstep of the opposite of that reality. In a world where Facebook and Twitter are dominant, transparent and nearly omniscient forms of communication, blocking something from the near or distant past out of your head has reached a new level of challenge.
My own struggles with this have led me to some new insights about my life and what I want for it. It's also led me to increasingly consider how I would like to use this tool, and the consequences for such transparency. More and more, I'm beginning to hear the stories of ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends stalking your every update, those who used to consider themselves sly being caught by the simple nature of their Facebook updates or even worse, their status.
And at its worst, I've heard stories of those who've been seriously wronged at the level of sexual assault, domestic abuse, molestation and more. I've also seen an increase in the attempt to set boundaries on such a scenario as exemplified by the recent circulation of groups like “No Sex Criminals on Facebook” and “I don't play Farmville.” The reality has nonetheless imposed itself upon those that have chosen to make themselves a part of the Facebook collective that now spans over 350 million.
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