Facebook

09/06/08

Posted by Karen

It was a recent request from my 62 year old father asking me to be his Facebook ‘friend’ that prompted me to take another look at the site. Until now, I’ve had a very half-hearted attempt at Facebooking, but with time to spare I logged on for a proper look and was quickly hooked.

It didn’t take long for good old fashioned insecurity to set in. Casting my eyes over my brothers’ 160 cyber pals, I was soon crazily inviting everyone whose name I vaguely recognised to please be my friend. Observing the countless photos and exhaustive personal information on other’s sites highlighted the inadequacy of my own Facebook space. This created a dilemma: what do I want to share about myself? Aside from concerns about identity theft, I’m not sure I feel comfortable recounting every detail of my life to a large group of faceless Facebook friends, as some people seem to.

I’d be no good in a focus group – it’s often surprised me how open some respondents appear to be on the most sensitive of subjects with a group of people they’ve only known five minutes. I say appear to, because what respondents chose not to say in an interview or discussion is very interesting. Just as I’ve edited my life story into a suitably acceptable Facebook version, so too respondents provide edited responses, after evaluating the social boundaries of the research situation. But people do have such different interpretations of boundaries in the same scenario. Did I really need to know that two of my former work colleagues hooked up and it was ‘jiggy’... or see those photos of my friend Ian’s hairy best mate in a bikini... or a girl I played netball with at school lounging in a bubble bath?