Here’s my proposal. On New Years Eve 2009 we close Facebook. Hermetically seal it and drop it in a data mine somewhere, as a noughties time capsule not to be dug up for a minimum of twenty years, when it can be gently mocked on a Channel 4 nostalgia show. We’ll look back on it and laugh at the primitive, puerile crap we used to do back then.

Ok, I still log in perhaps once a week, but I feel a bit dirty every time I do. Even only three years old, it feels hideously clunky and archaic now. And ever since the redesign it has felt to me like visiting my childhood bedroom after suffering a stroke. A place once familiar, now slightly twisted. Even so, I’d now find it difficult to sever all these tenuous connections I have re-established with people I’d once lost touch with (probably for a reason).

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is doing the rounds at the moment, promoting his new book “Delete”, on the value of digital forgetting, how our data trails don’t go away and the dangers thereof. I have talked about this before, and have myself been a victim of private data being used against me, but I still think, having not read the book (uninformed opinion alert) that it isn’t of too much concern.

Although, one thing that does worry me is the effect services such as Facebook have on adolescence and personal development. You can always tell when a Facebook user is of school or college age, because they have a minimum of two or three hundred friends. We wise, cynical old farts might (jealously) insist the majority of the people we knew at this age were probably, at best, acquaintances, but it doesn’t work like that when you’re a kid. It is only when you move on, leave home, go to university, that you grow beyond this stage and start to discover who you really are, and move in more exclusive circles.

Room For Re-invention

An essential part of that personal growth is re-invention. The first thing most young people did when they went to Uni in my day is go through their goth stage, punk stage, emo stage, dope-fiend stage, or whatever was on the fringes that year. This is because for the first time they had the freedom to reinvent themselves, and experiment (and make mistakes) with finding their personal style and identity. This is an important process; it is what separates the individuals from the sheep. It is those without the fear to find themselves who develop both the idiosyncrasy and, more importantly, confidence in that idiosyncrasy, to go out there and change the world.

But surely this is so much more difficult to do while you retain all these virtual connections to the people you went to school with, the people who used to make fun of you of every time you had a haircut, or a new coat. School is all about conformity; that is how the social structure of the playground works. And so is the real world too, if we allow it to be that way. If we enter the world with a status-quo reinforcing web of social connections already in place, it must be so much harder to branch out or grow beyond it.

I may be worrying about nothing. I recently re-read a 10 year old tech-sociology book (for the book, everything is for the book these days) which made a very big deal about how content on demand is going to mean the importance of the 8pm prime time TV slot is going to be lost. The answer that time has given to this problem is: so what? It is simply the way we operate today, from within the entrappings of social media. Hopefully, the iconoclasts of the 21st Century will find their own ways of dealing with it.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 10:34 am and is filed under culture, philosophy, society, tech, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.