Losing face

Social networking has become an integral part of our online lives, with Facebook leading the way. But in its web of friends, messaging and pictures lies a more sinister life of paranoia, spying and deception. James Wilkinson considers the new breed of problems that arise when you mix the social cauldron.

You might not like it, but the opening of Facebook to the world at large in 2006 marked the final stage of the internet's development from highfalutin diversion for geeks to an integral, organic part of modern society.

Oh, there were other social networking sites before that, of course, but they were always too niche: LiveJournal was for angsty teens, Bebo was for kids and MySpace was for bands and music -fans.

But Facebook coupled its simple, unthreatening colour scheme and intuitive layout with a seemingly endless supply of applications and general tat, thus appealing to both the less web-savvy older generation and technophilic youngsters.

Suddenly anyone of any age could locate friends, relatives and old high school crushes and maintain contact with them all through a single, easily-updated website.

The ‘web 2.0' era had arrived. But this brave new world comes at a cost, especially if you're as neurotic as me, because the merging of real life and the virtual online wrold of the internet has resulted in a new line of explosives being strewn across the social minefield.

Exaggeration? Not really. The impact of Facebook on real-life relationships can be immense. At what point in a budding relationship, for example, can you reasonably announce to Facebook that you are actually going out? It's not like it used to be - you'd be seen around town together, word would slowly get around and no pressure would be on anyone.

But now you might as well call a press conference or something, because at the press of a button it's all official and announced to the world. And it's not a decision that can be made unilaterally, either; you don't want to have to back down on that announcement so soon after making it.

It works the other way, too, of course. Take a friend of mine, whom we shall call ‘Robin' because that's his name: sick of having the detail of his life placed online, and not wanting to decipher the Facebook privacy controls, he decided to turn off his relationship indicator, only for the website to blurt out ‘Robin is no longer in a relationship' to everyone on his friends list, resulting in a flurry of concerned friends calling to console him.

And as lovely as that may seem, he assures me that the tenth repetition of that conversation was considerably less heartening than the first.

Other issues

Another danger inherent in Facebook is the merging of separate friend clusters. Chances are, the way you talk to your pals is different from the way you talk to your boss. And I certainly hope that the way you talk to your spouse is different from the way that you talk to your parents. But get everybody on Facebook and suddenly those subtleties are lost.

Those incriminating pictures from the party the other weekend might be hilarious to your best friends, but will your boss feel the same? Or the neighbour whose hedge you got so hilariously stuck in? And those ironic jokes about hating Americans are really funny until your patriotic friend from North Carolina reads your message wall.

But worse than having your friends hate each other is having them actually get along. There can be nothing more nerve-wracking than discovering that two friends, both of whom have dirt on you, have buddied up. Because who's going to be the one topic of conversation that they both definitely share? Uh-huh.

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Adding to the fold

Speaking of friends, Facebook has pretty much redefined the term from ‘A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard,' to ‘A person attached to another by a shared workplace, or a brief exchange at a party, or a confusion over similar names, or just because one of them already had 499 people listed and didn't want to stop there.' It's a disaster for anyone who genuinely wants to use the site to keep in touch with people they see on a day-to-day basis.

Oh, sure, you can turn away many people - especially those who have compulsively collected hundreds and hundreds of strangers and are therefore probably proto-serial killers - but when a real-life friend's elderly aunt offers the virtual hand of friendship, how can one say no? And from then on, the paranoia about those hedge photos is doubled.

Who wants to upset the elderly with shrub-related debauchery? And what happens when you want to have a night out with a few friends and another, uninvited friend finds the photos online? How often can you untag your name before you look really unfriendly?

Because in Facebook's world, appearance is important. It's like going to the school reunion every day of your life, and at any point that ex-girlfriend you never quite got over could turn up with a cocked eyebrow, waiting to be impressed.

So you have make sure you have the right number of friends, but how many? How many says, ‘I'm the kind of guy who has a varied selection of friends, but have enough time to ensure that they are all meaningful,' and how few says, ‘Please be my pal, nobody else will play with me at school'?

And, while I'm really making myself unsympathetic, don't forget to keep messaging the more attractive members of your Facebook party, so that their pictures appear regularly on your message wall and give the impression that you hang out with the coolest cats in town.

In fact, Facebook is such a complete social catastrophe that it's enough to drive one back to the ‘dark ages' of relying solely on e-mail and mobile phones. Hopefully this will be sorted out for web 3.0, but until then I think I'll be staying clear.

Personal or private?

As if the social neuroses created by Facebook were not enough, far more serious problems have recently raised their heads. Most notably, there's the problem of unscrupulous journos (not those who work for Windows, obviously) pinching photographs from the website for publication.

At the end of 2007, the British tabloid The Daily Mail nabbed photos from a Facebook gallery themed around horrendously drunk young women and reprinted them without permission.

The flimsiness of the paper's justification - that the girls had already put their photographs into the public domain on Facebook - was no comfort for those who found their pictures being distributed to a much wider audience than they had anticipated.

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The British Press Complaints Commission is now looking at redefining the boundary between ‘personal' and ‘private' data, to clear up the blurring effect that social networking sites have had, but this will mean little to those in the Middle East, or anyone who has already been on the wrong end of lazy, web-snatching ‘journalism'.

Elsewhere, a report in May by Click, the BBC technology programme, revealed that it is possible to write a Facebook application that allows the creator to access the personal information of its users. While anyone downloading the application can change the privacy settings to block personal information from being transferred, it involves a cumbersome process that will elude many users.

Windows can only hope that word of the loophole spreads far and wide, if only to thin out the deluge of ‘What type of house brick are you?‘ invitations we get every single day.