why are people so drawn to facebook?

[azzk1kr]

I'm 24 and I don't have a facebook, I did for a short while a few years back but got rid of it. It's everywhere these days and people complain that I don't have it. My reasons are:

- When I tried to get rid of it, it was a long process that took many repeated attempts. It was not straightforward to fully delete myself at all, and it made me think facebook is a deceitful, dishonest company that does not care about its users. The countless privacy scandals it has been involved in since then certainly back this up, I don't trust FB at all.

- I don't want people checking up on my life. I don't get why people are so eager to put their whole lives under a microscope. I know the reason my friends complain about my facebook absence, it's because I moved away from my home town a few years back and if I'm not on FB they can't check up on & judge my life. I know this frustrates them.

- Incriminating things can end up on the internet that once they're out there that's it, that's facebook's property. Who knows when something you do might end up on the internet and come back to bite you. I want the option to **** up every now and then and not have a permanent record out there that employers, parents, even police etc. can snoop on.

- I have many good friends but I don't care what any of them are doing, don't want to know their "status updates" or whatever - why do people think others are interested in this inane stuff? There are also people who I'd rather not have any contact with but who I know would want to add me and try and communicate with me.

- It seems to me like a narcissists' playground full of insecure people who are there to make themselves look cool/impressive.

So, what's the reason it's so popular? Is facebook's popularity a measure of how voyeuristic & narcissistic the world has become?

[Jess]

We just have no life and anything better to do, its what America is all about my friend!

[The Saint]

Why indeed? A scourge of the computer age.

[Wayne]

People are nosey.

[James]

it's gossiping and bitching about people without having to get your pikey backside out of a chair... it's great fun

[Cool]

Idk I use it to tell my friends when I am going to their house and to play games like Uberstrike ir Shadow fight.I don't post status about anything.

[sewrobb]

Short and simple!

You can be who you like, what you like, supply any photos from anywhere you like, brag all you like about your life style and NO PROOF required whatsoever!

It also is great for spying on other people and the greatest destroyer of relationships and marriages since FB started. Let alone other social networks and the internet in general it's self.

About sums it up!

[Patters]

The problem, as I see it, is that Facebook is a commercial service run by a single company, rather than a technology open to all, like email. People sometimes say that Facebook is a technology, but it's not; it's a service, built on existing technologies. And they have built a de-facto monopoly on mainstream online social interactions.

Facebook, as a company, has a vested interest in making Facebook, as a website, as addictive as possible, because the more often people use it, and the more indispensible they perceive it to be, the more power and influence Facebook weilds and the more money it can make.

Design can be a very subtle and powerful thing and Facebook has displayed great mastery of it. But the thing with design is that it works for whoever sets the brief; whoever commissions it. The end user is often not the person being designed for. Products are often designed not so much to suit the needs of the people who will end up using them as to suit those of the people selling them. Laptops, for example, now nearly all come with 16:9 screens, which are sometimes touted as a feature. Unlike the switch from 4:3 to 16:10, this is of almost no benefit to the user. It just makes them cheaper to manufacture by enabling them to share some of the manufacturing processes with LCD television screens, which are also 16:9. This design makes perfect sense from a manufacturing point of view, but very little for the end user, who is left browsing the web through a letter box.

What is beneficial to Facebook is often at odds with what might be beneficial to its product (the users), and sometimes even its customers (the advertisers). Facebook seems to foster an environment and atmosphere of unspokenly competitive, conspicuous socialisation, in which people feel they have to be seen to be social. Things are left open ended and entice mouse clicks all over the place, gently prodding people onto a treadmill of seemingly voluntary, ultimately unfulfilling but immediately compelling actions which they might never otherwise have thought worth doing.

When people respond to this atmosphere by trying to meet its standards of sociability, they become part of that same atmosphere and help to perpetuate it, all the while providing valuable data about their relationships, their likes, dislikes and interests, buying habits, fincancial situation, level of education, home life, opinions and many other things.

All of this data is extremely valuable to anyone who seeks to persuade, control or encourage the general populace in order to sell them things, win votes, garner support for their intentions and actions, or who seeks to make their very well known social networking site even more addictive, important and embedded into all aspects of society.

I'm not saying Facebook's usefulness is entirely a mirage. It isn't. It has useful features. But the way they are presented and packaged is more than the sum of its parts when it comes to what I have been describing above.