With Friends Like These

The Politics of Facebook

by Tom Hodgkinson, January 24, 2008

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” But hang on. Why on God’s Earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of super-geeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable with such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favorite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. (“I like Facebook,” said another friend. “I got laid out of it.”) It also encourages a disturbing competitiveness around friendship: It seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are “popular,” in the sense of being much loved in high school. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing’s new Facebook magazine: “How To Double Your Friends List.”

It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook’s third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That’s 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, two million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman, Chris Hughes, says, “It’s embedded itself to an extent where it’s hard to get rid of.”

All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook forever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.