TUESDAY was “Quit Facebook” day around the world but especially in Canada. The attempt to scuttle the famous — or infamous — social networking site was, after all, the initiative of two Canadians. Why they became so determined to do in Facebook is not entirely clear, at least to anyone who doesn’t actually use it or any of the other social networking sites — people like myself.
The phrase social networking, in fact, seems to be a bit of an oxymoron. The more addicted to sites like Facebook people become, often the less social they actually are. They may have a thousand Facebook friends but no one to talk to outside of the web. As one faithful Facebook aficionado lamented recently, she had been trying to find someone to talk to for 45 minutes without any luck. This must mean, she concluded, that she had no friends, and she may well have been right. Talking through the ether seems to me to be not much more friendly than passing gas in a crowded elevator.
But none of that seems to be the reason for Quit Facebook day. Its users don’t seem to mind that, for the most part, it is not much more than one huge, collective intellectual fart where people tell total strangers what they had for dinner and what colour underwear they were wearing while they ate.
There are serious issues surrounding Facebook and similar social networks. In Pakistan, Facebook was banned recently because a user urged others to post cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which to Muslims is blasphemy. A Pakistani court this week overturned that ban, saying the government could not limit freedom of speech and then went on to say that freedom did not include contradicting Islam. Facebook has had trouble in other countries as well — its only merit, as nearly as this low-tech Luddite can figure out — is that it is a conduit for free speech, no matter how fatuous most of that speech might be.
Rather, the reason that quitting Facebook was the talk of Twitter this week appears to be the company’s questionable collection of personal and private information from its users that it then sells to anyone who pays. Even that knowledge wasn’t enough to make Facebook users quit on Tuesday — the company won’t say how many did, but the estimate is about 40,000 pledges out 400 million users — and, with the threat of American legislation hanging over its head, Facebook has announced that it is tightening its privacy controls. That’s a step in the right direction, both for Facebook and for keeping government regulators out of the Internet, but it remains a jungle. Go ahead, talk your face off on the Internet if you want, but before you tell the world what you really did last night, give your life a reality check. No one has 1,000 friends.