Transparent living & Facebook "friends"

I now have a Facebook account, and this is how it came about:

A friend asked me when i was going to get on Facebook and i told her that i was tired of social networking sites long before Facebook had displaced the (by my count) second generation web-based social network, Myspace (with Friendster then being the first).

The next week i found a half dozen friend invite notices in my email and tried to log in, puzzled. Some eponymous high school doppleganger in Australia (digression: there must have been an awful lot of criminals in the ol' family tree considering that all the other Nathan Lovells that i know live in Australia) had stolen my identity, or rather, had mistakenly used my email address when signing up for his own account. Aforementioned friend had also sent a message to the account saying "I thought you said you weren't going to do Facebook."

Well, i requested a password via email and hijacked the account. In retrospect i probably have opened myself up to some criminal investigation scandal if i ever aspire to any position of import by doing so: long live the DMCA!

My objections to Facebook are myriad, and i will not enumerate them here because they are self-evident to a critical observer (and thus are easily found online). However, there are a few i want to discuss, and i'll tackle one now. The first is the socially objectionable introduction of a flip-flop "friend" label. Because "friendship" is the primary determinant of privacy control, it puts the user in the position of telling people that may very well be friendly, nice, all-around good folks that they are not "friends" simply because the user wants to limit the dissemination of his content (and exposure to that of others) to a circle of people that are actually friends. The equally distasteful alternative, of course, is to simply leave their invitations in limbo...

One of my goals this year is to live more simply and more transparently. The first is something i have been achieving with moderate success for a number of years as my awareness of the merits of a simple life has grown. Interestingly, this turned out to be one of those "fake it until you make it" situations; i had been living inexpensively for issues of relative grad-student poverty and innate frugality. It is only recently that various ideals have coalesced with my own first-hand observations of the potential fruits of this lifestyle and made me cognizant of the fact. The second part is actually an extension of the first: a segregated life is a complex one, unnecessarily so in my own case and judgment. The tendency towards perfectionism can lead to the fracturing of persona into multiple alter-egos which are tailored to their specific environment. This tends to make each a more shallow and less fulfilled existence.

Now, i don't subscribe to Zuckerberg's obsessive radical transparency ethic: “You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (2009) We're simply too complex and too multitalented to make it practical to assume the same image to all we interact with (however inconvenient that may be to Facebook as a business). Indeed, in discussing my impression that not having a Facebook account would detract from my professional opportunities, one friend pointed out that there are other services far better suited to professional social networking. However, there is something to be said for remaining the same person throughout the day, even while showing different facets.

Therefore the sway of fb has reached the point that i feel that the liabilities of not having an active account have outweighed the benefits: it seems to be a necessary evil. So, with that said, please don't be offended if i don't "friend" you or accept your invitation. On the other hand, if you are in that position and are actually reading this, there's a very good possibility that you should actually be on my "friends" list.

Let me close with some pot shots at fb based on my first few hours of exposure to it:

• I find it very telling that when you click on the "Friends" link, it doesn't show you your friends, but a million possible friends or ways to spam fb to others.
• It's so wonderful that you can express your undying "like" for everything from MIT to a fictitious TV character
• For being one of the leaders of the free world, the interface is amazingly clunky. I managed to lose a full page of captions by clicking a prominent, seemingly appropriate link in the interface for that page.