First Treatise on Facebook Epistemology and Ethics

Despite, and indeed perhaps because of, Facebook's most recent update, that being the news-feed and mini-feed, we are forced to look inward and reflect on this phenomenon of Internet connections. The general response to this change is one of antipathy and shock. We as a generation have become accustomed to the perks and benefits of online connections. Its uses are innumerable, ranging from the highly useful and, indeed, noble, to tacky and petty. We reconnect with old friends and keep up with current ones. We share pictures and ideas. We are able to reveal our likes and dislikes, the status of our lives, our jobs and relationships. We revel in the feeling of being popular. We send and receive invitations to everything from charity events to “Friends” marathons. We search out new friends and distant connections. We seek romance and whore ourselves out to the person who enjoys the same book or lists a funny quote. We are seduced by and addicted to Facebook as a balm on our broken self-esteem and a splint for our shattered feelings of purpose.

And in all of this we are lulled into a sense of privacy. A privacy which we have no reasonable right to nor possible expectation of. Here, then, Facebook is doing us a service with this change. We feel outrage that our every update and change is broadcast to everyone who has ever met us and some who have not, yet we take no responsibility for this. We are by no means beings spied upon or conscripted. We are not forced nor even pressured to reveal any information with which we are not comfortable. Facebook should be applauded for showing us our weakness and blindness. Convenience comes at a price, and to claim it we must be willing to pay.

Even if the price is too high, we are not being robbed. We are not being denied a life, friends, romance or even privacy. The dominion of Facebook ends on the piece of glass in front of you. Everything beyond the cyber world is untouchable. I would encourage us all, then, to both embrace Facebook as a tool, and shun it as a life.

Those who remain will surely suffer a new breed of cyber-Darwinism. Those who can adapt to the change, who can embrace its usefulness without succumbing to its opiates will stay on and their experience will be better than anything we have used so far. But they will also be the ones who have the realest lives outside the cyber domain. We will learn, once again, to live in the real world. If we have a conversation we wish to remain private, we will use the telephone, and no one except Big Brother will overhear. Or perhaps we will lose the five-hundred friends whom we simply added to comfort our minds and make up for the fact that we were alone on a Friday.

Goodbye and Hello, as always.