Sean Posada
Face-to-Facebook: Human Interaction as a Result of Social Networking
Facebook. It redefined what a friend is. It revolutionized communication. It broke the rules of social boundaries and personal space. And it’s not stopping there. On its own website, Facebook brags about its ever-growing domination of interpersonal communication: “More than 500 million active users/ 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day/Average user has 130 friends/People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.” (Facebook.com). Such facts suggest that Facebook dominates, or at least claims to, a significant part of our social lives. But what happens to your ‘self’ as it exits the internet browser and encounters face-to-face interaction?
I aim to unlock a deeper understanding of the connection between Facebook and the effects it has on individualism in the world outside of profile pictures, statuses, “likes” and groups. I shall suggest an answer to the question does the same person translate from on-screen to real life?
Before there was Facebook, Myspace, AOL, the internet, or even phones, most communication was accomplished face-to-face. As far back as man developed language, there was an intimate relationship between culture and interaction. The only way to interact was to talk with someone. And this was so up until the written word, where communication was made more convenient, efficient, and distant. There became a hierarchy of control, as evinced by the Egyptian “megamachine” where orders could be written, architecture planned on a blueprint, and communications passed down rather than direct interaction. One can see, as early as 4000 BC, the benefits of efficiency as evinced by the convenience of indirect communication overcoming the slower but more intimate face-to-face commands.
Later down the line came the printing press, the telephone, the television, and where we are now, the internet. Patterns developed over time where mankind limited his/her appearance in public and/or direct personal interaction to that which met the requirement of the needs of any given era, and rarely much more. For example, with the integration of the television inside of most households, it became uncustomary for families to have game nights, frequent trips to the park or family outings. A recent survey said that only five per cent of families said they never watch television together (Sims) and it is no surprise with the ever-growing need for efficiency and productivity in a post-industrial society. They just don’t have the time or energy to do the socially “intensive” task of interaction.
Then social networking, specifically Facebook, came along. This provided a network that allowed for interpersonal communication without the arduous challenge of leaving the comfort of your own house. Basically, you can keep up with more people in less amount of time with less difficulty. Efficiency at its prime. So we arrive now at the present-day circumstances as a result of a pattern of simplification, rationalization and less intimate shifts in a culture that values efficacy and convenience. It is now more acceptable to text someone or message them on Facebook than to call them or hand-write a letter addressed to them. Convenience has been embraced in cultures and societies which also value progression and efficiency. This pattern is revealed in inter-personal communication and interaction from Face-to-Face to Facebook.
I will assume that a great portion of time and communication is dedicated on the website of Facebook.com, by its users, between what Facebook will identify as your “friends”. But is there a different person behind the profile picture? Through observation, I have noticed the answer is yes, somewhat .
I have a Facebook friend named Fred, in social venues, is energetic, enthusiastic, and perhaps a bit over-the-top in his real-life interactions. I notice he is spontaneous and generally driven on impulse which tends to intimidate those who do not know him very well. On Facebook however, he has all the time he needs to collect his thoughts. He takes a profile picture that imitates a contemplative, reflective personality. He leaves inspirational quotes that you would never guess he’d known, let alone appreciated, as statuses. I observed also that Fred leaves the most benevolent comments on friends’ walls and he writes long, contemplative pieces as a note for the public to see.
I notice that Facebook reveals a side of Fred that may otherwise go unnoticed. There is a benevolent Fred whose Facebook wall is plastered with appreciation and grace, and whose bedroom wall is lined with random “lolcats” and internet memes. It would seem that either Facebook created a new, unique face for Fred, or that it unlocked a persona of Fred that was initially unable to find a medium through which to express itself, but thanks to the comfort of Facebook, he exposed his “inner-self.”
What about Facebook creates this paradox? For one, there is the fact that face-to-face interactions are often in small groups. On Facebook though, your information is accessible to all of your friends (which Facebook averages at 110) to put on a show for. That’s a lot of pressure to abide by social norms and strictly avoid anything that would offset the perfect “image” of yourself. It’s almost like stage fright in front of a large audience, except this time the stage can be manipulated.
So, going back to Fred, he can be more ridiculous in his small group of friends, his class, or his team in real life. But if you expand the audience to an auditorium or a large venue, you see that it’s hard to act silly. This can be so because the risk of seeming foolish and appearing socially improper and unacceptable is greater. You have a larger audience and thus larger pressure to please (in order to avoid becoming a social outcast).
Another difference is that, generally, of the numerous Facebook friends you may have, you might only interact with a fraction of them. I’m generalizing this claim because if a user has an average of 110 friends, I’m assuming that they would interact with far less friends face-to-face. I’m making this assumption quite dangerously because there is no empirical evidence proving this, but from experience, I’ve noticed that it would be near impossible for most Facebook users to interact with all of their friends on Facebook in the same manner as real life.
From this assumption, you are reaching out, generally, to an audience which you’re not entirely familiar with. That is, you aren’t quite as close to all 110 friends as you are to the few that you may call your best friends. Being thus distanced with your audience, there is increased pressure not to embarrass yourself or give off an image which you would not want a stranger to see.
To conceptualize this easier, imagine being as “natural”, as you are with your best friends, with, say, a random person on an elevator. Without the intimacy that you developed over time with your closest friends, the interaction with this person is considered, and actually is, awkward. The same translates as you compare face-to-face interaction with Facebook interaction. You wouldn’t be as intimate on Facebook as you would in face-to-face interactions, or in Fred’s case, you’re more intimate on Facebook than in real life. Regardless, there is a significant difference between the way you interacts face-to-face and on Facebook.
In face-to-face interactions, there is a certain tone, script, and composure that you must maintain. On Facebook, there’s no way of telling what mood you’re trying to convey. This leads to self-censorship online, something used to deter yourself from misconstruing your message to the public. There tends to be an online vocabulary that simplifies emotions and phrases as not to confuse the audience. It even proves so effective that the very acronyms developed for use online are used in face-to-face interactions, where people sometimes spell out “el-oh-el”, “bee-tee dubs”, etc. However, such acronyms don’t effectively capture a true emotion, feeling or mood.
So, when Fred says “lol” on Facebook, you can’t assess how hard, or even in actuality, he’s laughing. But when a joke is told in person, Fred’s reaction can clearly be observed.
Also, the backspace or delete message features are available on Facebook and not face-to-face. What happens as a result? Words can be reconfigured over a longer period of time until they suit the sender on Facebook. Thus, messages on facebook can be a result of several edits, but face-to-face conversations require thought-to-speech executions in an instant.
But we are the same on Facebook in some respects. The same way we walk alone down a crowded street and don’t normally break out fervently dancing salsa, we don’t step out of our boundaries on Facebook by commenting on unfamiliar friends’ pages. We don’t typically send a friend request to strangers, and we don’t poke people. Such things maintain the awkwardness from real life into the social network. This shows that Facbook has not completely dominated or altered our personal lives.
Subsequently, the big question becomes, are you the same on Facebook as you are is in real life? The true answer is uncertain. It requires a complex, case-by-case analysis for each user, but even the most thorough analysis for one is never quite the same for another. The only certain answer is that Facebook cannot fully capture a face-to-face interaction. There are always idiosyncrasies and mannerisms unique to face-to-face interactions as there are personas we adopt on Facebook. These aren’t necessarily bad or good, just different. It’s a sign showing that the human adaptation reflex is working. There is a problem, though, when you cannot decipher between Facebook and reality, where you should draw the line, and when Facebook becomes more real than face-to-face interactions, but these are troublesome cases that require more in-depth analysis. You need to be able to critically analyze your own social life to discern what you value more and therefore which self of yours is authentic: the Facebook self or the face-to-face self.
What does this all imply? Well, nothing definitive can be proclaimed as the effects of Facebook in real life, or vice versa, but it does reveal that interactions, given the right setting, can have different levels of intimacy, mood, interpretation, character, persona, context etc. To truly observe one fact, it is that the trend of efficiency and convenience has made it culturally acceptable to be less personal. By this, I mean less face-to-face interactions are becoming increasingly favorable. Whether this is good or bad is a philosophical debate all on its own…
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