Facebook

Facebook users should be fairly well-acquainted with how they use the website, but I feel a brief statement on the site, its functions, and its use is necessary to flesh out this essay.

To draw once more upon my favorite source, Wikipedia:

“Facebook is a social network service and website. As of July 2010 Facebook has more than 500 million active users, which is about one person for every fourteen in the world. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.”

I shape my personal history with Facebook. I post status updates with how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, what’s going on in my life. I state, using Facebook, that I am attending a certain event. I go to that event, take pictures of myself and my friends there, then later post those pictures on Facebook. (I admit, I even go so far as to alter these pictures. Sometimes this is limited to cropping incriminating items – bongs, beer cans – out of the pictures, in order to protect reputations; other times, in terms of this essay, I figure my progeny won’t need to know every detail about my acne, so I photoshop it out.)

My friends do the same. Their posts show up, refreshed in a real-time “news feed” on my Facebook homepage. Wall posts, event RSVPs, what people like, notes people write, games people play, their high scores – I see all this as a constant affirmation that we, people, humans, Facebook users, exist.

“We are writing… we are writing… we are writing…”

How one uses Facebook to communicate is, however, extremely limited to Facebook’s own rules, functions, and capacities. One can click a button to show that one “likes” something, but this is the only option – there’s no “dislike” button, no “disagrees with” button (oh how many times I have wished I could state, with a mere click of my mouse, “Hannah Kane doesn’t give a shit about this”). If I want to write a status and make sure my friends see it, I can tag them: “Hannah Kane went to class with @Ash Bruxvoort today.” But only six tags are allowed in a post. Why six? Six seems like such an arbitrary number.

When I post photos, I can tag people in them; my Facebook friends (though admittedly not all 1,011 of them) can click through and see all 1,182 photos that have ever been tagged of me. If someone tags me in a photo and I don’t want that tag to exist, I can remove it – once again, with one simple click – and I can’t be re-tagged without my consent.

In ways like these, I and 500 million other people cultivate public histories viewable to at least a segment of the rest of the internet-using population.