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Completely in your face
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Facebook has blurred the divisions between the real and the make-believe
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He thanks me for the apple martini and insists that we “do Scrabble again sometime”. He rummages through my bookshelf and leaves after making a smart aleck comment on my taste in books. If it doesn’t surprise you that we aren’
t even in the same time zone, that we haven’t sat across each other and moved wooden letters around, that my ‘shelf’ is an application that can be dismantled with a mouse click or that he doesn’t drink, not even socially, you’re probably an old hand at Facebook.
Networking
Thanks to this larger than life social networking website that’s gained cult status in recent years, the lines between real and make-believe have blurred and, in some cases, vanished altogether. At first sight, Facebook is a world in itself, intimidating first-time users into logging out in a hurry, overwhelmed by the possibilities it offers. The second session isn’t much easier, for that’s when you realise that it’s all you can do in real life plus a few extras.
Gleeful adults spend guilt-free hours indulging in juvenile preoccupations such as throwing a snowball at someone (never mind that it’s April), shaking magic eight balls, squirting glitter, instigating food fights, answering multiple choice questions to find out which “Seinfeld” character they are most like or adding aliens to friends’ solar systems.
A haven for the socially awkward, Facebook lets users hit on, serenade, dance with or propose to people without the complications of face-to-face interaction (although you must already be a friend of this person to have access to these ‘actions’). Much like a perpetual conveyor belt, the site makes it redundant for people to be online at the same time to play a game or have a conversation. You simply ‘send’ a hug, play your turn, leave sticky notes on their walls and get on with life.
Time and distance be damned, you always know what everyone else is doing. Users meticulously provide status updates on their lives – working out, partying, recovering from Christmas cake disaster, sleep deprived. By clicking on the wall-to-wall link, users can read entire conversations between friends, privacy being irrelevant for it’s mostly small talk. It’s always the season for gifting at Facebook. And here, it’s (literally) the thought that counts. Free Gift applications allow you to give friends virtual champagne flutes, mittens, bouquets and lava lamps. Applications like ‘Growing Gifts’ encourage users to gift more by ‘unlocking’ fresh gifts as a reward every time a new gifting milestone is reached.
For all its wonderful qualities, Facebook has an unmistakable ‘Hotel California’ vibe to it. It’s highly unlikely that you log in to ‘poke’ someone and log out immediately. A list of requests on the right side of your screen will draw you in.
If you find your fingers glued to the mouse, your eyes red from exhaustion and that deadlines have come and gone, welcome to the club. Reality just got less interesting.
SRIYA NARAYANAN
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