When Mark Zuckerberg unleashed Facebook on an unsuspecting, albeit incredibly receptive, Harvard studentship, communication as we know it began to change rapidly. Now estimated to be worth over 100 billion, the social media site has become an integral part of young people's lives. Yet, if their young CEO is to be believed, Facebook's mission statement goes far beyond simple dollars and cents.
Zuckerberg has stated that the site "was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected." This goal is to be achieved by the sharing culture that Facebook promotes. Users have a platform to intimate what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with friends, acquaintances and complete random strangers on a moment-to-moment basis. In short, they finally have the opportunity to get their inner life the hell out there.
In 1918, Brinsley MacNamara's novel The Valley of the Squinting Windows provided Irish people with the perfect term for the societies in which they lived, which, if we are to believe what we hear, were insular, suffocating affairs where the public and the private were deliberately and energetically kept separate. The colloquialism is still used today - though it is slowly falling out of circulation as the net curtain is ripped from around Irish lives. Rather than wheeling out the Sunday best once a week and cultivating a "front door" manner for the neighbours, a new generation of technology fiends are dying to talk about themselves, using iPhones, laptops and Blackberrys to tell people what the neighbours don't know yet.
Nobody is disputing the importance of communication to a healthy society. One of the key characteristics of a well functioning family or society is the ability for clear and direct communication. Thanks to social media, people are communicating more than ever, and it's certainly direct in nature. I'm not online? No problem, just tag me in a post or include me in a tweet to get my attention. However, it's interesting to note that another trait of healthy social groups is the acceptance of differences in feelings and opinions. Facebook's adherence to this requirement is less clear-cut, as many users experience a form of social control unknown to past generations.
Sure, you can technically say whatever you want, post photos of the more quirky aspects of your life and generally let it all hang out online - but you may suffer the consequences of such individuality if it doesn't fit in with the code of your peers. Friends can and do voice their opinions and disapproval, often by means of humour and teasing, even after you've logged off. As distinct to other forms of human interaction, taunts in cyberspace are harder to address.
The online communication revolution has fundamentally transformed society. As a character in The Social Network put it, "We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the Internet!" Yet one must ask if the change is merely structural, with the content remaining the same. Have social media merely succeeded in transferring human behaviour, with all its faults intact, to a different medium?
