Facebook and Me

I’ve had a Facebook since I was 18 years old and a senior in high school. In order to be part of Facebook in those days, one had to have a university or college email account to sign-up. In the five years since then, Facebook has opened up to millions of users of all ages and has become a central part of many identities. In the first couple of years I used the site, I thought of it as a fad. I planned on deleting my account once I was finished with school in order to maintain a professional appearance and make friends outside of the virtual realm. Now that Facebook’s user base has grown to include almost everyone I know, I’m not so sure I will be deleting my account any time soon. Facebook allows me to stay connected with family and friends, network for school and work, and pass the time when I get bored. That being said, since 2006, Facebook has lost its simplistic, intuitive, exclusive, and user-friendly charm. In many ways, it maintains a paper trail on users’ lives that the virtual age had at one time promised to erase.

When it comes to Facebook, I’m fairly open about the information I share. I post my phone number, my address, my email address, pictures, and interests. I’ve never considered myself a private individual, so I feel comfortable about disclosing aspects of my life for others. After all, if I was born thirty years earlier, my address and phone number would have been published in a phone book anyway, right? If someone cares to know what my favorite movies are, my political affiliations, or where I work, those are pieces of information I would be comfortable sharing in face-to-face interactions, even with strangers. However, choosing which interests and pictures I want to include on my Facebook does affect how others will perceive me, and it creates an identity that may or may not be realistic to my true self. For instance, I’m gay, but I do not explicitly publish that I am interested to men on my main profile. Someone may be able to discern my sexuality by looking at other pages on my Facebook, but by not saying that I am interested in men, I am not including myself in the imagined gay community of Facebook users. In this respect, I think Facebook highlights the fluid and arbitrary membership of imagined communities.

Nowadays, I’m not so sure that there are many definitive norms to using Facebook. One probably makes sure that his or her boss doesn’t have access to pictures, especially embarrassing ones, or censors what is posted on walls, depending on who one is friends with, but Facebook is not a particularly well defined space. It could be formal and strictly for business, but it could also be for finding a potential mate. In my teaching, I could see myself creating a Facebook group for each class I teach in order to give students a central space where they can post questions or concerns with a specific class. If that is the case, though, I would have to create a more professional Facebook profile for myself.