One common response to mention of Facebook among the Gen X and Baby Boomer (in other words, over 30) crowd is the disdainful “Why would I want people to know what I had for breakfast?!” Use of Facebook, these people declare, is shallow and silly.
Now, it is true that many people – and not just youngsters – post to their Facebook stream rather unimportant snippets from their daily routine; and their Friends on the service can ignore it or react to it with equally inane comments. But that’s hardly unique to Facebook; people getting together in a bar or a pub seldom pronounce earth-shaking insights either. So what’s the problem?
Which reminds me of that wonderful hobby of my youth, Amateur radio. Of course that was also about Geekdom, and homebrewing complex electronic gear; but it also involved sitting up late nights pounding at a Morse key to set up contact with like-minded “hams” from remote lands. And you know what? With few exceptions, what we discussed was our locations, antennas, weather conditions and quality of reception. Even more boring than what we had for breakfast. Yet no one criticized us as shallow or silly!
Why not? Perhaps because we had our medals, so to speak: everyone knew that radio hams were an indispensable asset to their community at times of crisis or natural disaster. Everyone knew of some ship or mountaineering expedition that was saved through a diligent amateur operator’s efforts. True, these cases were rare, but they earned our hobby respect.
And now, at last, Facebook is earning its own medals as a beneficial force in society. In the past year Facebook is increasingly seen to impact the affairs of nations; most visibly in the “Arab spring” revolutions in the Islamic world, but also in less violent situations. In Israel it is being used by the current grassroots protest movements seeking to restore sanity to food prices, increase housing availability, and revise the national priorities to focus on greater social equality and justice. Non-violent as they are, they already have a huge impact; and they all began as a call for protest in a Facebook page started by a young individual. A month later, the government is trembling in the face of the hugest demonstrations the nation has ever seen, and much hopeful change is in the air.
So… next time someone tells you that Facebook is about what one ate for breakfast, remind them that it has earned its medals, and the right to talk about breakfast if it wishes – in between overthrowing tyrants and channeling nationwide protests. Saving sinking ships is nothing in comparison!
There are some analogies to email: I was communicating across the globe; I made contact with many people I’d never met before; and, let’s face it, much of what we said (or pounded out in Morse code) was not very interesting per se: weather conditions, equipment and antenna configurations mostly – about as fascinating as much incoming email. And yet it was fun – an adjective no one would ascribe to email.
