Facebook: Freak, Fellow, Friend, Fiend or Foe?

The first time I used Facebook was in 2011 and I was 15.

My friends had been raving about for ages but I had not relented. To be perfectly honest, I had no real intention of getting Facebook for no reason other than I had no interest. Quite frankly, I just couldn't see the point in getting it and using it to speak to people that I spent the whole day with anyway. Why would I want to do that? I could just see them the next day and talk to them then or maybe even use the ancient art of texting. We still knew what texting was then, didn't we? It wasn't that outdated, it isn't that outdated, right?

Or maybe I could even have used my phone to, like, call someone if I wanted to take an authentic vintage approach to communicating with my friends. But why would anyone want to go to all that trouble when they could just use Facebook? I don't know maybe I was just old school.

Anyway, moving on. If you're so cynical about it, you ask, why get in the first place? Well, let me tell you, I probably wouldn't have if a couple of friends of mine hadn't moved overseas. Good friends too, not just the kind you see walking around at lunch times who are maybe a friend of a friend of a friend, and you don't speak to them but you add them on Facebook anyway. These were good friends. So, that was one motivating factor.

Secondly, I had just been on a really amazing family holiday to my Mum's family's mother country (i.e. Samoa) and I wanted to share the pictures I had taken with my extensive extended family so that I didn't have to send out a group email with heaps of pictures that would take forever to send and receive. I also didn't want to select just a few pictures to send so that the whole process would be faster. I wanted them to see everything, I had enjoyed a really fantastic time in Samoa so I wanted them all to see it. Here's a picture below if anyone's interested :)

So, after my friends moved away, one to England and one to Hong Kong, and after I returned home from holiday, I knew that I should probably conform and join the Facebook community. And I did.

I joined Facebook, I posted my photos on there for the family to see and enjoy, I spoke to my friends in England and Hong Kong and kept up to date with what they were both doing... It was pretty cool, actually. I liked being able to do that stuff and I still do. To this day, these two uses remain the only real reasons I bother to go on Facebook. But that does not discount the fact that, at first, I was seriously bothered by the whole privacy thing when using it.

It was not the government monitoring or the big brother paranoia or the Facebook information collecting that bothered me so much as the fact that anything I posted could be viewed by a lot of people. Of course, I instantly made my Facebook account private, but the fact that random people could send me friend requests kind of freaked me out a little. Now, I am less concerned about all that stuff because I know I can just sneakily click on that "Not Now" button and then "No" when it asks me if I know them outside of Facebook but it still sort of weirds me out when I get a request from a random guy in Canada or something with a strange name like MegaTreeLopper.

However, despite the strangeness of receiving friend requests from strangers, the thing I found most odd about the nature of Facebook was the fact people who I didn't personally know or people who I had never spoken to and ignored me in real life, wanted to be friends with me on Facebook. I mean, what is that? Why would they want to be friends with me if they didn't even spare me a second look when they passed me by in real life? What would motivate them to do that?  I'm sure everyone has experienced this, but I am equally sure that most have just given a casual shrug, said: "meh" and added the person anyway. I haven't, I wouldn't.

This is the aspect of  Facebook privacy that bothers me. To me these people, distantly friends of friends or not, are as good as strangers, therefore I do not add them and I do not understand why they would want to add me. I would feel incredibly uncomfortable to know that some random person that I go to school with but have never actually spoken to could have access to my photos and basically just anything I post if we were 'friends'. It would make me very uncomfortable. And while I don't want that discomfort, it also causes me some concern that they (i.e. the person sending the friend request) either do not feel that discomfort or do not realise that they should feel that discomfort if were to become friends. It's a two way street, you know. If I don't know you, you don't know me either. So, why would you want to be my 'friend'?

Most of the time, little issues like this are issues that bug me most about  Facebook and the way that people use it. I don't care if the Australian government or some other government sees my stuff, I've done nothing wrong, I've got nothing of importance to hide from them, so to them I say "meh." If giving my Facebook account the once over helps them do whatever it is they need to do, I'm not particularly bothered. And if Facebook wants to collect some trivial info about me, to them I also say "meh." If I'm using their service, it's under the terms I agreed to and if those terms included allowing them to know some stuff about me then I agreed to it so whatever. I see the reasoning behind that. But if some random person wants to add me on Facebook, I do care. I think it's weird and, frankly, I just don't get it. 

So, Facebook: Freak, Fellow, Friend, Fiend, or Foe? You decide.