I do not deny that it has been delightful reconnecting with my long lost friends through facebook. It is, indeed, a useful communication tool.

But if you take a closer look at what grown poeple are doing on facebook, you will see that they are occupying their time with inane activities. They send people virtual cappaccinos or play virtual easter egg hunt games. They sit in front of their computers, lulled into a comatose state, while the world goes right by. Messages are usually brief, as in the twitter style, further diminishing everyone’s attention span.

It is no wonder that we are losing jobs to foreign countries.

I gave up Facebook for Lent. I started with a policy of accepting friend requests only from people who I have a ‘current’ relationship with; No old friends or flames. I admit in looking them up myself but was left with a feeling of consentual prying. Like looking through someones mail left on their counter.

Sharon,

Sorry, but that’s ridiculous.. losing jobs has nothing to do with Facebook, and people shouldn’t feel bad about goofing off with easter eggs.. Besides there are plenty “cause” pages and rallies and everything else in the world. It’s a tool, you can do as you wish.

Honestly I still prefer myspace.. it’s where the weirdos hang out. XD

I read the NEW YORK magazine article which was insightful, but didn’t touch on the subject of data mining. Information is powerful, and 200 million people (myself included) are volunteering a wealth of personal information about themselves and others. Is that information just being used by marketers? How concerned should we be about the faceless-ness of Facebook?

I joined, it’s ok, I hardly use it.
I have more important things to do then to spend hours on PunamBook.

I live in Beverly, my first FB post was “I’m having tea with John Updike!”, and he died 3 days later! Is there a lesson there?

Facebook has turned into a Twitter rival. It used to be a website to interact with each other via wall posts, messages, and pictures. Now I am barraged with mundane status updates.
And why do companies like Vitamin Water have websites that start with a facebook domain?

I have been on Facebook for over a year and I have been able to reconnect with friends, especially from college, that I never thought I would see again. I am 38. That has been fun.
I do find myself thinking of my life in terms of status messages sometimes. But I only log on about once a day.

Mark,

Sorry, I stand by what I say. The only concession I will make is that I am not sure which came first: is facebook facilitating our mass stupidity, or did our mass stupidity allow for facebook’s success.

“Joining” a cause on facebook does not do anything but make the “joiner” feel good.

All the best,
Sharon

I find that facebook is a great venue for discussion of political perspectives and current events. Friends and colleagues will post relevant articles in their profile which frequently elicit discussion between individuals who would have never connected or interacted in the “real” world. I think it’s an excellent tool for raising political awareness and social consciousness.

Susan Grossberg

I wanted to ask your guest Vanessa what she thinks about the fact that your Facebook page shows up on a Google search showing 6 friends. Even if you set your privacy settings to Private. So if you Google your name you’ll see your photo and a random selection of 6 of your friends. This even without requesting to be ‘friends’. Seems like a breach of privacy. Does Facebook have an answer to this?

I have older relatives on Facebook and my boss! Thank God for limited profile view. Does anyone know if the military also issued a ban on Facebook or was it just MySpace?

Hello Tom,

A few months ago I joined Facebook becasue my daughter wanted an account. At first I said no and then I wanted to be fair and gave it a chance by joining to learn more about it.

I didn’t like it. When your show was on the air about this topic for five minutes and deactivated my account! I am a face-to-face contact, telephone, letter writing kind of gal. I use e-mail and prefer the one-to-one contact that it provides.

I prefer to stay close to my friends next door to across the worlda in a far more personal way as I mentioned above. I would like my daughter to know what “friend” really means now when she is young before she can join a Facebook world full of friends.

Thanks for listening,
Rita

Thru facebook, I found a friend I went to high school with and worked with 39 years ago. Also found a woman that I dated in 1981, that coincidentally now has the same last name as I, although we did not marry.

It’s just such fun…

My son moved to Nevada a number of years ago. He was active in the outdoor life and made friends all over the world in the climbing community. Last fall he died in a mountain climbing accident. Face book has allowed me to keep up with some of his friends. They post pictures of their activities and adventures which I truly enjoy viewing. In a way it keeps his connections alive for me.
Besides that, the first night I logged on I found a high school friend I had lost contact with almost 40 years ago. That was great!

I think kids are going to move on to another venue soon. My older brother, a grandfather “Friended” me a couple of months ago and I have since “Friended” all of my 50-something friends. I was touched when my daughter “friended” me – allowing me into her world. (Sometimes I learn more about her life than I hoped to know!)

But I figure this involvement by oldsters is growing exponentially and soon it will lose its youthful mood & youthful participants. Us old folks will continue to enjoy it – I’m amazed at how many of those “gifts” and games that one send to one another that I receive from my contemporaries.

I have found Facebook to be a wonderful way to re-connect with long-lost friends in ways that regular e-mail or the occasional phone calls or letters can’t do. As a networking tool, it has allowed me to become acquainted with distant family members and other people that I never would have otherwise had the opportunity to do. I use it as a way to share information about myself and to bridge the time and distance that separates me from people I am interested in being connected to.

For older users like me who don’t spend all that much time on Facebook, it is a great site for finding old friends and keeping in touch. I don’t go on often but a little is all I need. By the way, I got to Facebook via friends in Latin America and most of my Facebook friends are located there. If there are weird things going on Facebook, I and my friends never see them. And none of us post anything too personal. It is worth noting that the rest of the world is far less trusting than Americans and far less likely to post information that is too personal on Facebook.

Hello, I must say that while I lived in Worcester, MA I was vehemently anti-Facebook, myspace and all those other social networks. For many years, I was somewhat ridiculed by my friends for not having a profile. But I thought it all a bit uninteresting and somewhat silly. “Why do I need to check my friends on a website when I call them or send them a regular email?” Just before I moved to Ireland I set up a profile, at the insistance of friends and family, so I could keep in touch. Now 3 months later, I find myself somewhat addicted to it. I very much look forward to checking the new post at the end of the day, keeping in touch with friends and family not just in Massachusetts, but also friends that moved long ago to other States, old school and college friends, co-workers, literally everyone I’ve ever been connected to!! It’s truly great! I even now have new friends here in Ireland and I’ve also added them to my profile. It has been super handy, but I have to say, I am also tired of all the request to join causes, the gift sending, the little quizzes, the games… I do enjoy the connectivity that it has provided, but some of the applications bombard my inbox and it gets to be a bit much!! Aside from that, I am beginning to enjoy it tremendously. The Pro’s certainly have outweighted the Con’s!

Its a phase. Remember Friendster?

Personally, I think face-to-face contact is coming back!

As a full time independent musician that wears all the business hats, I have found Facebook to be enormously helpful in marketing my music. I have over 1000 friends and fans and I have even sold my CDs by using Facebook as a marketing tool. Networking sites have been a boon to those of us who have trouble being heard.

Hello Tom,

Very interesting topic.

Brian Unger had a very funny bit on twittering (which is one part of Facebook) back on March 24th. If possible, you should play part of that. It was very very funny, and very true.

Cheers,

Francis Conneely

Listening to the show and I’ve gotta say, it sounds like the usual whining. If you don’t want to get updates about everything your friends are doing, go to the settings page and turn off the updates you don’t want! If you don’t want the government to know what music you like, then don’t post messages about it on the Internet for god’s sake! These people whine about the content, when they have to actively click on a link to see the content!

Grow up, take responsibility for yourself and quit whining!

I held off joing Facebook as long as possible. When my daughter left to study abroad she wanted to keep in touch via facebook so I could follow her journey!! I gave in and joined. I was and still am amazed what people put on such a public venue! And the fact you go to bed and wake up with 11 new “friend requests” is a bit surreal. I still communicate with my daughter via facebook even though she is now back in the country, and its a way for me to keep in touch with my extended family all over the country. I like the fact that I only have 47 friends and I keep in touch with 95% of them weekly. A lot of my friends and co-workers have as many as 700+ friends. I don’t understand that. And I really wish face-2-face would be the new trend!!!! Or a good old fashion phone call!!!

BJ Fogg just spoke a falsehood when he said that Facebook is the most convenient way to access our social landscape. Not only does that assume that we all have ample time/access to be on-line it also fails to consider depth of contact. Any social content that disallows body language, for example, loses much of what there is to be conveyed. So if you can conveniently access just a fraction of the social experience, that needs to be factored in. He comes across too much like someone who has drunk the punch and is a bit too much of a booster for this particular social network.

Hi Tom,

I’m 57 years old and am on facebook. I call it my faceliftbook page. I see what my kids are doing (they know how to party).

Jane

While facebook has certainly made socializing easier, it has also raised the bar when it comes to social expectations. People now expect you to interact very frequently, perhaps too frequently. I’m too busy to be a social butterfly. For as much as facebook has helped, it has also created a new requirement for how much we need to communicate.

I only sign into Facebook three or four times per year for a few days. I could spend every waking hour on Facebook catching up with friend but just can see spending that time.

If a facebook “friend” turns stalker or harasser, can a person “dis-invite” a person from his facebook site?

I joined Facebook to keep in touch with my grown daughter who lives several thousand miles away from me.

Realistically, there is no substitute for direct, eye-to-eye human contact. Facebook is to human communication what McDonald’s is to food: Ubiquitous, over-advertised and devoid of nutritional value.

This demonstrates the power of facebook and twitter as geopolitical tools.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08moldova.html?hp

I got off of FaceBook last week after being on there for two years and I felt instant liberation. I am in the age group where my friends are often not on there yet and so I made “friends” with my friends’ children in hopes that the parents would sign up. That didn’t happen and I became embarrassed of reading the activities of these young people. I also felt that there was a real lack of privacy. My old college roommate’s husband (whom I had never met) wanted to be my friend. When I looked at his profile it said that he was “married but looking for women” – how creepy is that? I could go on and on but FaceBook is not for me.

That’s the point, it’s not facebook, it’s the social internet that’s doing it.

Noreen,

Of course. You just unfriend the person, and they cannot see your profile (also, you might need to set up privacy which says only friends can see your profile.)

So the girl in the caller’s story obviously wanted the boy to see her profile. It seems in this case there are two side to the story.

All the best.

Sorry Mr. Fogg your so wrong, world peace? Facebook will help bring about world peace? This is a bit much. The culture intolerance is alive and well and will not be diminished by facebook or any other technology.

Wishful thinking, but so naive.

I don’t understand why the 2nd guest from Stanford would not listen to any arguments against the proliferation of Facebook usage.

I feel a lot of social pressure to join Facebook and wonder if it would alleviate some feelings of social isolation, but I know in my heart that real communication with real people is much more meaningful and productive. Also, my time is too valuable to waste looking at drivel on a computer screen outside of work. Though, most people are probably looking at it while at work, which does give credence to Sharon’s argument that Facebook has caused job loss.

I believe that a person’s attitude towards Facebook may have to more with whether or not they have literally “grown up” using Facebook or not.

That is, it is almost easier for an adult (with or without computer skills) who understands self discapline, personal and professional boundaries, and appropriate networking to utilize all the positive aspects of Facebook.

For adolescents and teenagers who are still navigating their personal and public selves, still mastering time management, and perhaps don’t have concrete personal goals, Facebook presents more difficulties. Instead of a “tool,” it becomes a sort of “construction site” of experimentation. As a school teacher, I see kids post things that are innappropriate, waste hours and hours posting pictures, and developing whole friendships out of “one-liners.” Unlike adults, they do not fully comprehend the ramifications for their actions. They feel accountable in the same way as they do in person. Kids who grow up socially on Facebook and now are young adults don’t view Facebook as an opportunity or tools, but almost as a return to petty playground for kids.

Perhaps this is why there is more resentment and turning away from Facebook in younger adults who have virtually “come of age” on Facebook and now need to leave home and explore a bit more of the world.

Sorry for the above errors–I posted too soon!

I deactivated my Facebook account a couple weeks ago for a variety of reasons, all strictly personal. To start with, I have an addictive personality. Doing anything in moderation has always been an issue for me. I’m also self employed so what I do with my time is entirely my business. But, that said, I felt it was occupying way too much of my mental energy because it was on my mind almost all the time. Plus, I also woke up one day and decided that a 46 yr old man shouldn’t be behaving like a high school kid and I really felt embarassed. Since my departure, a lot of people have told me they really miss my presence and humor on there. As we go into summer and people spend more time on vacations and outdoors, I think you’ll see a big slowdown in Facebook activity among people my age. I may get back on in the fall, but I felt it was best for me to recognize my weaknesses and step back for a while. I’ll revisit it later on in the year and see how I feel about it then.

I was on the fence about joining Facebook for business purposes, and thus jumped on Twitter last June, as I saw it might be “Facebook Light.” I do enjoy sharing and learning with others. As a small business owner in the travel sector, it helps to connect with others in an arena not dominated by the Goliaths of the tourism industry.

Still not on Facebook, and don’t know whether we’ll ever get there, but I do hear about more and more folks from all corners of the world on board. Would it be better than yearly Christmas/New Year’s letters that I enjoy?

I am not so concerned with the arguments about whether Facebook is frivolous or not. There are lots of way to waste one’s time, it’s just a matter of finding the ones that work for you. I am concerned about the issues of privacy and data mining. What is done with the information that people post about themselves? How does Facebook make a profit if not by trawling through peoples’ accounts for data which can be used by advertisers? It’s the concerns about privacy and ownership of information that are the real turnoff for me.

In response to Gerry’s comment, I feel that we, as users, are opting in to these forms of data mining. Just as Google offers us free search, but data mines our searches, cookies, and cache, Facebook offers us social networking, but data mines our profiles and comments. Although I understand your fear of what these companies will do with the data, it is not in their best interest to violate our privacy or push us beyond our breaking point. The data Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc does that, they will feel the backlash, in the form of loss of membership or activity. Maybe Facebook should adopt Google’s motto to reassure critics, “Do no evil.”

I was just listening to part of your program about Facebook. I believe I am the exception to the trend. I am 30, a collage graduate with a degree in Communications, am married and my husband and I are childfree by choice. We live in a very rural, very poor area of the country and are usually the last to hear about anything like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I have never been on Facebook and could not tell you what their homepage looks like to save my life. I do belong to an online community, one that predates Facebook and My Space, and have off and on for several years. At one point it was not just part of my life, it was my life. Eventually I had to go cold turkey, so to speak, and have just recently started participating again, but not to the same extent. I have just heard of Twitter in the last two months and have no interest in having an account there, or on Facebook or My Space.

I realize that this sounds very backwoods-y to a lot of people but it is my life and I have no interest or intention of having the details of my life splashed across the internet for everyone and their cat to see.

I just checked out the Google search and sure enough it gives you the FB of the person and some of their friends. Not that I’m hiding but it seems a bit intrusive ..

Francis Conneely wrote:Brian Unger had a very funny bit on twittering (which is one part of Facebook) back on March 24th. If possible, you should play part of that. It was very very funny, and very true.
——————————————————-
Francis, Twitter is NOT part of Facebook. Twitter is a short messaging site where you are limited to 140 character postings to answer the question: “What are you doing now”? http://www.twitter.com
I am a member of both Facebook and Twitter but lack the TIME and WILL to use either.

Brian Unger’s mocking of twitter was awesome (and true), see the link below:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101619832

It has been a good communication tool with me. I live in the UK and most of my closest friends and my family live back in the USA. Also, it is good for work, as I work for an international NGO and meet lots of people through work all the time. We cycle across countries together to raise money for children in Africa and Asia (e.g., http://www.cycletanzania.com). It’s also been good for me to share news (like this story!), music and comedy that I like and read some articles and hear music or comedy that others post. I miss the patchwork quilt of photos on my home page though (not fond of the new format). I think that the trick is to make FB work for you and not be a slave to FB!

This was a very interesting discussion. I am a facebook member and often wonder what the cost-benefit ratio is. Ultimately I think facebook is a very useful tool, if you choose to use it as a tool. I also enjoy the sharing of ideas–not the incessant updates of what people are doing, but the sharing of links and videos–just to say “hey, this is worth checking out.” What I don’t think was addressed in the show though was the social pressures of facebook–for example, there are some “friends” I have on facebook that I no longer want to keep in contact with, not because I don’t like them, but because I have moved on and want to let the past go. Only, I worry that removing a friend on facebook could be seen by that person as a social slight–it’s hard to explain that you just don’t want to know someone anymore!

Anne-Marie, it’s true that Facebook and Twitter are seperate corporations. But I think Francis Conneely was referring to Facebook status updates, which are effectively the same as tweets.

I was disappointed at the lack of attention paid to the privacy implications of the data Facebook collects.

Facebook users voluntarily create dossiers about themselves more complete than even the wildest dreams of the totalitarian governments of the 20th century. The Stasi, for all their legendary thoroughness, didn’t know as much about East German citizens as Facebook knows about its users.

People say, “but what I do isn’t interesting,” and “who would bother searching for me”. That may be true, but computers change the rules. What you put on Facebook might not be harmful by itself (or it might be – what repressive government wouldn’t want a list of its critics and everyone they know?), but it could be very harmful when combined by a computer with the other massive piles of data collected about you every day. When a computer can search through millions of records in a day, or an hour, or a minute, you don’t have to be big-time to be worth searching for.

Logan Parsons,

I hear your dilemma – I face the same issues regarding friend requests and some friends who are more like acquaintances. Here’s what I’ve found useful:

1. You can unfriend a friend and they won’t be notified of your action. So, unless they are the compulsive types who check their friends list regularly, or keep note of the number of friends, they won’t notice as long as they’re not sending you messages on a regular basis.

2. You can “hide” a particular friend, and then you won’t see their updates etc. appear on your page and in your feed.

Hope that’s helpful.

Oh and if you unfriend someone and they send you an accusatory email, you also have the option of blocking them – your profile won’t be visible to them, and they will be unable to send you any message. I had to use this option for a neurotic female ex-friend and it gave me great peace of mind.

After several tries at therapy and a degree in psychology, I have found that my (not unreasonable) time spent on FB has been much more helpful than either of them. I was suspicious at first, but eventually filled my info page with sincere responses. Those responses do not have to be intimate to be meaningful. I have in some sense “claimed” myself, and continue to do so with my status updates. Keeping track of my friends seems like an extra benefit that I don’t want to do without.

it’s just a tool like any other tool and it is what you make it. if you find the tool useful, use it. if not, don’t.

I find it interesting that people say that they are able to be in contact with so-and-so that they never thought they would be in contact with again. What does this say about us individually? I offer a flip. It seems that this mentality reflects our individual needs to feel important. Perhaps it is not so much that I am in contact with all these people, but that these people are in contact with ME.

I’m part of the over 35 crowd recently joining Facebook. I’ve connected with old friends, heard new music, seen photos of weddings and children and other positive things.

Also experienced the TMI of Facebook and had to hide some friends because I really don’t want to know that much about their personal lives.

What I find annoying – inane quizzes, plants and safari items and peeps and other gifts I don’t want, people who post hundreds of photos that take up my news feed, status updates “I’m thinking” or “watching tv”….

Josh, it means we’re lazy.

Not only was that a great On Point session, the comments are fantastic and make for great research. I don’t do Facebook personally but I do advise certain clients to do so, depending on their goals. I agree with so many comments that a lot of social networking is a complete waste of time (and it’s indicative of the general state of unemployment right now). Like kids addicted to video games, social networking enables one to zone out while feeling like you are “doing something.” On the other hand… we are social animals. We reach out. That’s what we do. And we use the net to SEARCH on areas of interest and for solutions to problems. If you want to market yourself or your product, recognize the zeitgeist and get yourself onto the social networking space. Cold calls to sell me something do not work as well as having your product show up when I search for a solution. We are in a time of transition, guys. My field is marketing and marketing is all about trying things you think should work, and seeing if it does. The smarts come in figuring out what should work, for whom, and when. Transitional periods make it much more interesting.

[...] wit: Wednesday’s On Point program that featured Vanessa Grigoriadis author of “Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own [...]

Boy, what a sophomoric analysis from your guest Grigoriadis: a litany of vague complaints, unspecified yet grave concern, and very little to back it up besides personal anecdotes and now commonplace criticisms about life in the digital age.
So much good writing and research on this (e.g., http://www.pewinternet.org/) and we get a conversation ironically typical of a Facebook exchange.

Sorry Tom, you guys missed the point this time.
E.C.B.

[...] Facebook Culture- NPR show Facebook Culture [...]

With Einstein’s reference to “standing on the shoulder of giants”, one should also take note of the following fact while talking abt Facebook -
“…In 2003, as a student at Harvard, the founders of ConnectU had Mavinkurve write code for their then-nascent social network. That group, which included wealthy Olympic-rower twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, then brought on a kid by the name of Mark Zuckerberg to do additional work. Next thing they knew, he’d launched a remarkably similar site called TheFacebook.com, which ConnectU’s founders believed was built on their site’s code. Lawsuits ensued, which Facebook settled last year for $65 million…”
http://tinyurl.com/dgp384

To me, Facebook is basically an address book on steroids. That’s all I use it for. I can’t imagine that I would ever need to know more than the 50 or so people of whom I truly care to stay in close touch. Just let it be that.