Whose Facebook is it anyway?

Facebook used to be just that, an online “book” where you could display non-literal representations of your visage, along with other manifestations of your “face.” The “friends” box demonstrated how popular you were, the “personal info” box displayed your excellent taste in music, and your numerous photo albums informed others of just how much fun you were having. Facebook was special because it allowed people to keep in touch over long distances in a way that was never really possible before—the wealth of constantly updated personal information made it easy to feel like you were getting face time with friends and acquaintances all over the country and the globe.

But as of late, Facebook has become more of a tool for mass publicity than for personal expression and social interaction.

No longer are Facebook pages limited to people and their pets. In the age of new media, it seems like every organization, both for-profit and not-for-profit, has a Facebook page. I once had the strange experience of watching a very dramatic and operatic commercial for the U.S. Marine Corps and afterwards being encouraged to visit them at facebook.com. It was a jarring experience.

But it isn’t just big organizations that solicit Facebook support; my inbox is full of suggestions for me to become a fan of this and that—from my friends themselves. Friends have asked me to become fans of the company they work for, or the cause they support, or the publication they write for. I’ve even had at least two friends request that I become fans of them (to be fair, one is a fashion designer and the other is a musician). Though I am sure these individuals have only the best intentions, I can’t help but feel that it’s rather odd to ask someone to declare herself a fan of something that she probably couldn’t care less about on a personal level. And the worst offenders are often the friends that could only be defined as friends on Facebook.

These “friends” don’t know me well enough to write on my wall, but they don’t have any qualms about pressing their interests onto me. There is something deeply depersonalizing about the fact that people can look at their social networks as potential marketing tools in this way. Somehow, I feel that the people-to-people connection that makes Facebook so special gets lost in the shuffle—when I get asked, along with a hundred other people, to become a friend of HUDS or an entire a capella group. I’m sorry, but my Facebook is not an advertising space for all the things that my “friends” do.

Although this development is fairly innocuous in itself, it seems to indicate a negative trend in the way we view our relationships with other people. It has become increasingly acceptable for individuals to use friends as publicity vehicles. Many employers appear to even encourage this type of behavior; more than a few jobs that I looked at for this summer indicated that familiarity with use of social networks was a plus. However, when there are already specifically business-oriented networking sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Xing, the mixing of business and personal relationships on Facebook is entirely unnecessary and detrimental to the site’s purpose.

Perhaps this is merely the march of progress and my lamentation will go down as a typically shortsighted protest against change, akin to doomsday predictions about the Internet, Twitter, or texting. But just wait ’til the day when you open up your Facebook to see that you are a fan of Jim’s T-shirt Company and a member of the group Nominate Me for City Council Member of (insert small town here), and you might just realize that the “face” presented by that page isn’t yours.

Adrienne Y. Lee ’12, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Quincy House.