To FB or not to FB; that is the question.

Last week I got a Facebook “Friend” request via e-mail from a long-time friend who’d been avoiding and making fun of Facebook since I signed up a few years ago. Of course I’d invited him to join, tried to convince him he was missing out, and told him it was my comfy little social outlet, but he continued to question the sanity of Facebook and its users until a few days ago.

I was so sure the out-of-the-blue request had been generated by some kind of Facebook worm that I wasn’t about to “confirm” our friendship until I’d spoken to him in person. He was, I thought, truly the last person who would ever join the social network I’d come to enjoy with my first cuppa every morning.

On the phone he said “My new business (Monkey Bars Storage Solutions) pretty much demanded I get on board; I can avoid it no longer . . . but it made me feel somehow ‘dirty’ to sign up.”

That same day I got my hands on a copy of Time Magazine with Mark Zuckerberg, Person of the Year (26-year-old founder of Facebook), on its cover. I found this rather serendipitous. I hadn’t seen the movie SOCIAL NETWORK, but was curious about how and why the whole FB thing got started. I read with interest the entire 14-page article (plus another 10 pages of pictures). Twice.

The article was thorough and well-written, pointing out both pros and cons of the Facebook revolution. The fact that Virginia Woolf was quoted made me smile. In 1924 she talked about a fundamental shift in human relationships she’d noticed at the turn of the century “between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.”

Fast forward a hundred years, and we’re living through another transition where “there is an erosion of trust in authority, decentralizing of power, and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another.” A willingness to share our lives on the Internet seems a sign that many of us are less concerned with privacy than were our ancestors.

Facebook has 600 million users – making it the third largest “country” after China and India. (Did you know Facebook is blocked in China?) The average FB user has 150 friends, whereas our ancestors may have encountered only 150 people in their lifetime. Even the FBI comes to Facebook headquarters with subpoenas to tap their database. Half of all Americans use FB and yet 70-percent of users live in other countries.

The article talks about Zuckerberg’s life as a boy with his two sisters (to which his psychiatrist mom attributes his sensitivity to relationships). It talks about the real Zuckerberg’s motives and character being vastly different than the way he’s portrayed in The Social Network (movie). For one thing, people who know Mark say he is almost pathologically indifferent to money and although he does have some odd social traits, has had a steady girlfriend (since before he invented Facebook) and lots of friends – so neither money, women, or social life were motivating factors.

Mark’s profile shows one of his interests to be “Eliminating desire for all that doesn’t really matter.” He has a rare trust in human beings, so his users’ privacy complaints always jar him a bit. He tries to accommodate the need for privacy, but of course thinks all of us are as bright as he is about figuring out how to opt for greater privacy. Given the ever-growing range of privacy options offered, he cannot help but mention that being on Facebook is, of course, voluntary to begin with.

Some become destructively addicted to Facebook. Others get themselves into trouble because they forget that FB is a lot like having all the people you know in the same room at the same time – and when they post, they forget how many, and what kind of people are in the room. But the vast majority of users like it or they wouldn’t be there. Zuckerberg thinks if you have something to hide and aren’t technologically capable of setting your preferred level of privacy, you probably shouldn’t be there, no matter how badly you want to spy on others.

So, my friend, Mr-Monkey-Bars-Storage-Solution, can you handle a little less privacy?

Oh, never mind. The new business-owner of which I speak (who just caved and joined Facebook) is an old IT computer geek. If he can’t figure out the intricacies and privacy options, nobody can.