Lucy Tobin: Now we can feel the true power of Facebook

Its shares’ rise may have been dented but the social network is roaring ahead: it has changed our lives
1 November 2013
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A dozen words cost Facebook $18 billion. Hours after the social networking giant’s latest financial results revealed that it’s making even more money out of us — revenues up to a record $2 billion (£1.3 billion) in just three months — a Facebook boss uttered 12 words revealing that younger teens aren’t logging in any more. And shares plunged faster than Jimmy Savile’s popularity. “You don’t want to see a trend that kids no longer think Facebook is the place to be; that it is now their dads’ service,” said Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle. “The kids are Facebook’s seed corn, and you don’t want to lose that.”

But let’s not shed a tear for Facebook. Its juggernaut will continue. The site is still busy making money from the Frankensteins it created: the nosy, self-promoting monsters who have grown so addicted to its strange version of fame. That’s me, and you too, if you’re an ardent social networker.

It doesn’t matter if Facebook is no longer the place to see and be seen for the tweens. It doesn’t even matter — for all but a handful of wealthy Wall Street investors — if Facebook is on its way to social Siberia (that is, where MySpace lives). For Facebook has already brought about a seismic cultural shift.

Facebook made it first acceptable, then the norm, to constantly Photoshop our lives. The boastful Christmas letter, that annual missive in which Great Aunt Bessie showed off about her wonderful grandchildren, her exceptional luxury holidays and her amazing luck on the stock markets this year has become the default way in which social networkers portray everyday existence.

Facebookers can’t just digest a nice meal at a restaurant but must first “check in” to said restaurant on the social network, bragging about their affluence, luck or rich boyfriend to the 700 people described, most likely on Facebook alone, as their friends.

Facebook changed our world, in a way that seems to me to be something we shouldn’t all “like”.

Other sites have developed the trend since. Instagram means even photos of our beach holidays can be “filtered”, aka improved, to make the sand whiter and the people browner and the jealousy factor greater. And with the Facebook-linked app Tinder, we can now swipe through thousands of friends-of-friends’ faces to find a potential husband or wife. The most important decision we might ever make, boiled down to a cursory glance at someone’s Facebook profile picture.

But it was Facebook that started this zeitgeist. Social networking means we can now all be celebrities within our social worlds. Look at what happens when a couple post their engagement on Facebook: hundreds of “likes” and comments rush in. For the couple it feels fantastic to be at the centre of that bubble of importance. I know, I posted that arty shot of the glinting diamond captioned with the clichéd smiley myself two years ago. But then learning of a family friend’s death via a Facebook notice posted minutes after her demise felt wrong.

Today we are less private people yet we hardly seem to have noticed; as if we were waiting to plaster our lives on the web. Taken to its extreme, sociologists wonder whether the Facebook factor is behind people’s dissatisfaction with their jobs and partners. One piece of research even suggested a third of divorce petitions filed in the UK last year contained the word “Facebook”. Many, surely, used the site to identify philandering. But how many others were left, after hours of having others’ photoshopped lives thrust in their face, feeling bereft at their life’s mundanity?

Hollywood might have created a film about Facebook, but Facebook put a film up in front of our eyes. It’s a film of self-importance. And Facebook has coloured our outlook in other ways.

Privacy is dominating the news: the current furore over the US spying on European governments followed swiftly on the heels of the controversy over leaks from Edward Snowden alleging the widespread collection of citizen data by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Yesterday it was Google’s turn to express outrage following a report that the NSA had hacked its data links. Yeah, Google: that well-known guardian of personal data.

Snowden’s latest documents claim that millions of records were gleaned from the internet giant’s internal networks every day. But this story has rumbled on long enough for it to become clear that young people don’t care. Even my “activist” mates haven’t disappeared from Facebook. Retaining access to the site that makes it easy to organise parties is deemed more important than making a point about personal data, to the extent where it seems the only people who do care about privacy are those with something to hide.

Facebook has made privacy seem like something antiquated; deserving of nostalgia, perhaps, but something we don’t need any more.

Clearly the site has become a lightning rod for criticism, perhaps deservedly since it now accounts for one in every five minutes spent on smartphones. It’s intertwined with cyber-bullying, and critics claim that’s one reason teens are switching off. Yet Facebook is not the only website to change how we behave and act. Plus it, and social networks like it, can be a force for good, giving hard-up charities and budget-slashed councils a quick, cheap way to disseminate information and to fundraise.

Shame, though, that Facebook is not so charitable with the UK — paying no corporation tax in this country last year despite raking in more than £200 million from its UK operations.

Britain is so lucrative for Facebook because it’s become so easy to forget that the friendly blue website isn’t just an innocuous place to go for a light procrastination session. It might not demand your credit card details but there’s nothing truly free about Facebook: it’s a business, with soaring profit, and you and your personal data are its currency.

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