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November 21, 2008
Facebook as a town square
Website helps build the community we are so sorely missing.
MIRA SUCHAROV
My friends and family (including my four-year-old daughter) know that I'm a Facebook addict. Now, no addiction is good as far as it goes, but I'd like to make the case for why I'd like you to join Facebook, if you haven't already.
Facebook, the social networking site created by a Harvard University student in 2004 for his classmates and which is now open to the world, today boasts more than 100 million users, five times as many as when I signed up two years ago. At that time, I discovered 10 people I knew on the site, one of which was the son of my summer camp cook – a boy I knew at eight years old and who is now a university graduate in his twenties; others being my younger cousins. Two years later, I have more than 400 Facebook "friends," ranging in age from 13 to 89. The total rises, as I add colleagues or cousins or old student-council schoolmates, and falls if people's postings become too sophomoric or otherwise offensive to my sensibilities.
Now, most people know that Facebook is an effective tool for reconnecting with old classmates and being able to display one's evolved, post-high school self, but what I think is a less-discussed aspect of the site is the sense of traditional community it fosters.
For this writer, who desires a more global village in this disconnected postmodern world of ours, more community – where people keep track of one another – is a good thing.
Long before the telecommunications revolution, people congregated in the town square, sharing personal news and events from farther afield. Recall the scene in Fiddler on the Roof, where a group of villagers, one wielding a Russian newspaper, tell Tevye about nearby pogroms. Since the rise of what Benedict Anderson has called "imagined communities," created through the invention of the printing press, more people have had access to the news, and generations of kids were able to afford a record collection by delivering the morning paper to people's breakfast tables.
But then the technology revolution happened, coupled with the rise of the automobile and the creation of suburbs, and people converged at work but spent their leisure hours at home. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone catalogues the decline of communal recreational activities and the subsequent atrophying of civic identity. Add to that family obligations, keeping people with kids at home or in the car – driving older children to their activities – and fewer people have time to socialize – in person – with their friends.
Enter faxes, cellphones, e-mail and then Facebook – at first meant to tie undergraduates to each other and create more community in what is sometimes an alienating first-time-away-from-home campus experience. Broadened to include the world at large, it became a tool for sharing perceptions and personas, and cultivating artistic and intellectual outlets.
My almost brother-in-law is a talented recreational photographer whose photographs I would otherwise rarely see, hesitant as he would be to send them directly, for the potential hubris implied. However, when I log on to my "home feed," I see his postings, replete with a discussion of the technical process that led to his inspiring creations. I often comment and ask for more.
My husband and a distant cousin of mine in California trade urgent political missives on Facebook, which is remarkable, since they have only met for maybe 30 seconds at a family wedding and probably would not have recognized each other on the street. These are relationships that existed in the abstract, but are now more tangible through wall postings, inbox messages and photo comments.
Facebook is good-natured. People are positive and supportive and excited to help you rejoice in the personal transformations or small acts of meaning with which we try to infuse our lives. Mention a self-help group and spark a conversation with someone who might never have had the wherewithal to inquire. Build a sukkah and decorate it with fabric flowers and twinkle lights. Post a photo on Facebook and people will help you celebrate those quotidian bits of happiness that make you want to get up in the morning. Post that you're heartbroken and others will ask why. Showcase your leafy lettuce and rosy stalks of rhubarb to friends across the country, as you may have at the local country fair before we all moved around for jobs and other economic opportunities.
In this age of iPods and YouTube – private listening and viewing experiences – coupled with economic alienation and political disengagement, a bit more community, connection and simple recognition of each other's existence can only serve us well. So come to the virtual town square that is Facebook and be welcomed for who you are.
Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University.
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