I'm addicted

To Facebook.

And I think I'm not the only one. I heard somewhere that at any one moment 50% of Facebook users are logged in. With smart phones this continues to increase. I don't know if it counts smart phones that automatically sync and update you when you get a notification as "logged in" but still, even if it were 25% of users logged on at any one time, I would be surprised. Many users don't use Facebook often, which means that of the 75% that use it regularly 66% are logged in at any one time. Does that seem crazy to you? It seems crazy to me.

Another thing about Facebook is it makes us feel less adequate as we see our friends with happy posts all the time, (and for other reasons, like misspellings, and misunderstandings). We spend all of this time assuming everyone else is doing ONLY what they post on Facebook, and nothing else, yet we post only eventful stuff on Facebook, not the normal hum drum of life (although... I do have a few friends that post ever time they wake up, brush their teeth, change their clothes etc etc...). I think I will continue to post happy events on Facebook, and continue to enjoy other people's happiness, but I'll just imagine that they are sitting at home, staring at their wall, hoping someone will post on it as much as I am :)

After writing a final paper on privacy though, it got me thinking, has our social media really changed our ideas of privacy. According to this article (and it actually links to a book site), people have changed their views of what is private and what is not. Breakups are now in the public realm, and people post ultrasounds for their babies almost as instantly as they see them. With this, the element of surprise has been destroyed, and people know exactly what to expect the next time they see you, unless you're only posting the happy things. Similarly, we choose our lives the way we want to live them, but we often envy parts of people's lives that we chose not to have. The first article I linked mentions that infertile women should try to shield themselves from Facebook posts by friends who recently had kids. But I also have friends who post about their inadequacies, possibly searching for support from friends, and sometimes these make me feel better (or when they misspell stuff).

But Facebook is doing one more thing for us that we don't realize, it is opening up our connections to more friends than we can handle. According to an experiment done at Gore-Tex (an outdoorsy production company) people can really only handle about 150 "friends" at a time. I know I have 350 friends on Facebook, and I have friends with over 1000, but I couldn't name all 350, I could probably barely name 100 of them, simply because my brain doesn't have the capacity. However, I can definitely stalk them all!

R