Large Fierce Mammal

Communicating doesn’t need to be this complicated.

Mrs. LFM and I first opened Facebook accounts in 2007. In that time we’ve watched the site evolve and reveal itself, collecting some observations along the way that a lot of what’s been written about so called “social networking websites” in general, and Facebook in particular, never seem to fully grasp. In fact, I am including an entire chapter on the subject in my upcoming The Large Fierce Mammal’s Small But Weighty Book of Etiquette – Volume 1. Recently, and much to the chagrin of some, we announced a long planned, slow but steady withdrawal from the level of Facebook interactions we had previously indulged in, and that for us had the effect of lightening the level of background noise more than a little bit.

So, why do Mrs. LFM and I still have Facebook accounts at all? First off, we actually like, or at least receive some level of uplifting benefit from knowing, the people we connect with there. There are people in our lives right now that we have never met, and are overjoyed to know, first of all because of the internet, but for some of them, the use of Facebook facilitates keeping those lines of communication open. For the most part, our reasons are based on what has been a steady process to simplify our life by eliminating anything that has a net benefit value of zero or less. This means that, for each of us, there are aspects of Facebook that match that definition by being intrusive or otherwise negative while, compartmentalized as it is, we can cherry pick the parts of Facebook that we find to be useful tools in the fulfillment of our own agendas.

For example, as professional dog behaviourists, we employ Facebook as an easy and efficient way to communicate both with our clients and respected colleagues in the field. We do the same in maintaining contact with people engaged in other areas we have a personal or professional interest in. I maintain a Large Fierce Mammal Facebook page where I post whenever an article is published here, and is the only way some people will find their way to read it. Therefore, for me, Facebook is a promotional vehicle.

As a tool then, Facebook has its uses. What follows will highlight a few of the pitfalls that you should consider.

Facebook offers a “free” service that encourages virtually unfettered sharing of personal information by its subscribers. People join voluntarily, and can participate in the Facebook “community” to whatever degree floats their boat. Once on Facebook, you can make yourself accessible to no one you haven’t personally chosen to interact with, everyone anywhere who has a Facebook account, or a dizzying variety of iterations in between. You can also choose to apply those same kinds of freedoms and limitations to individual people on a case by case basis. You are even free to delete your account and get out of Facebook altogether provided that you can find the latest hiding place of the menus that permit you to do the one thing Facebook management seems hell bent on protecting you from. All this sounds wonderful, community based, and completely safe, but it’s not.

First of all, notwithstanding that Facebook doesn’t overtly charge its users for access to or use of its services, it still makes a lot of money and continues to increase those revenues at a prodigious rate. It does this by selling information gleaned from site usage and content voluntarily engaged in and submitted by its subscribers – that would be you and me. It has yet to be proven, just as it has yet to be disproven, that Facebook engages solely in the sale or distribution of general site content indicative of social or marketing trends. Its terms of use do not prohibit doing the same with user specific site content – those hot pictures of your wife in her new bikini bottoms on the topless beach in Spain last summer for example – and in fact Facebook lays claim to ownership of everything you have ever posted to it, regardless of your privacy settings, and in spite of any attempts you may have made to delete any damn thing. In the end then, you are actually paying for your use of Facebook by authorizing them to do anything they want with anything you do using your Facebook account, whether within the actual Facebook website, or on any other website that links back to it (clicking “like” on another website’s Facebook icon is going to get recorded by – you guessed it – Facebook), for ever and ever, world without end, amen.

Another issue is the fluid nature of Facebook privacy settings, most particularly the way they often default to less secure levels whenever a new version of the site or its services goes live. Unless you simply decide you don’t give a shit, it’s important to keep an eye on that because it has been known to occur unannounced, leaving an account’s content open to unexpected unauthorized scrutiny.

The next issue is one that flies in the face of all that should be holy to any website or service that purports to foster “social networking” and a sense of “community” – the way that Facebook “friends” can  appear to have actively deleted you from their “friends” list when they have actually done no such thing. Every now and then this happens because of a Facebook brain fart, gets noticed by one of the two people involved, and runs the risk of actually damaging real world relationships.

I used a lot of quotation marks in that last paragraph because I have a hard time typing the word “friend” in the context of Facebook while at the same time struggling to keep my face straight. I find a grim irony in the way a consistently growing population has granted an assemblage of electronic systems, built to serve the agendas of people they have never met, a level of trust and credibility exceeding that previously reserved for the people who are actually in their lives.

Another irony is that, at the same time the quality of education and accepted standards of literacy is engendering a decline in the ability of people to communicate clearly, we are actively building ourselves a world that relies on written means of making our thoughts and feelings known. It is consistently held that the words used in communicating with someone carry very minor weight in conveying meaning, and in fact one UCLA study went so far as to state that, “… up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues.” A second study further defined the components in human communication and their efficacy in conveying meaning:

• Words used = 7 %
• Voice quality = 38%
• Non-verbal cues; i. e, body language = 55%

If you spend any time here, you’ll know I don’t have a lot of trouble expressing myself clearly, and I will state emphatically that I routinely engage in written conversations with people that I have never spoken to personally, but who are of a sort that leaves my day uplifted in absolute certainty that nothing I ever say to them will be misunderstood. Nevertheless, these statistics are supported by my more than 30 years as a professional solver of other people’s problems. They are why there are things I will not communicate about solely in writing because the risk of misinterpretation is too great, most particularly in contentious or otherwise emotionally charged issues.  Add to this the aforesaid dumbing down of the population, the sheer volume of it that regularly participates on Facebook and other text based social networking sites, and you have a recipe for disaster that can send real human relations to hell in a hand cart.

The lure of Facebook is multifold. Some of the people who get mired in it actually deserve everything they get. Those are the same people who are living unhappy lives because they have consistently built their real world relationships on the same poor choices and unsound expectations, all the while never cluing into the fact that they are the single consistent ingredient in every failure. Everyone has heard that famous definition of insanity – repeating the same behaviours hoping for a different outcome. I don’t believe I’m trivializing anything by saying that you don’t need to spend much time on Facebook before you’ll turn up something that matches that. Those people are there to get attention and seek to engage others into holding the belief they can help fix what’s broken. When that happens, well meaning people can get embroiled into investing huge amounts of time in trying to help someone they barely know, who may actually be better served by a professional. Worse, they can find themselves unwittingly enabling someone who is opportunistically disinterested in fixing a damn thing because what they actually want is the attention they’re getting.

On this and other levels, Facebook facilitates what I consider to be an erosion of sincerity and manners. Within its confines it’s routinely considered a meaningful gesture of support to click the “like” button if you’re in favour of somebody’s cause, or “share” a status update if you are for or against something, investing nothing tangible and actually helping no one. Someone who actively does this over the span of a year will waste hours of life they’ll never get back just embracing this bullshit. Then there are the, “… send this to 10 of your friends including the one who sent it to you if you believe all people are beautiful …” chain letters, and the endless events that are organized solely on Facebook, end up with half the world’s population saying they’ll come, and ultimately fizzle when three people show up. All this because it’s far too easy to mindlessly click that “like” or “share” button.

So, good reader, if you are an active Facebook user, heed my words and make up your own mind whether it’s you who are using Facebook, or if it’s really the other way around. Think on your real world relationships and reexamine whether you are losing contact with those truly close to you at the same time as you seek constant connectivity to people you barely know or don’t know at all. Look into someone’s eyes and tell them how you really feel. Once in a while, say something that’s truly original and heartfelt that wasn’t copy/pasted from the work of someone smarter or funnier than you. I enjoy a well timed quotation as much as the next guy but this shit is out of hand. Examine why every morning has to start with a public announcement that today, just like every other day you’ve been on Facebook, you let the cat out, poured yourself a cup of coffee, and now you’re listening to the radio before dressing for work. Actually schedule the time to attend events that you reflexively signed up for, and if you want to throw one of your own, send out targeted invitations the old fashioned way. Donate in tangible and meaningful ways to causes you sincerely believe need your support. We humans are social animals. Don’t let “social networking” make you less of one.