Facebook changed it all

I watched “The Social Network” today and thought it was an amazing movie. With great characters, plot and photography, the movie took me to the birth of a revolutionizing idea, a creation that changed social life, communication and human behavior.

The movie suggests Facebook was created to connect university students, catering their need of connecting with others and sharing personal information. And with the creation of a then-Harvard student, the world changed.

Before Facebook, the need to share thoughts, rants and personal information was available only to those with a blog. But even then the information wasn’t readily available for all to see. Opinions were only read if you told friends about it or if people knew you were talking behind someone’s back. Otherwise, you were spending hours talking to the Web with no audience.

Once the option of writing on someone’s “wall” or sharing status updates were available, information became public. So much that privacy concerns became a problem.

When was the last time you hit the “backspace” or “delete” button after a status update? You’ve come to learn that what you publish is open for everyone and retracted your statement. The communication you once had with friends has become selective; some are worthy of knowing raw thoughts, whereas sometimes opinions are filtered in order to avoid offending someone. Other times you simply don’t want a friend to know where you’re at and choose not to share that piece of information.

Selecting what is published and what isn’t was rarely thought about before social networking. MySpace, Xanga or Livejournal never quite reached that potential, but it was certainly the beginning of social change.

But why did Mark Zuckerberg need to create such a technological device that would have us glued to our screens? Why do we spend hours browsing through people’s lives? Is there a need to know their lives?

Yes.

Last semester I spoke with a psychology faculty member and told me the need to be social is vital to human beings. Our human ancestors needed to be social in order to survive, she said.

And that human element is still with us. Perhaps it’s become an addiction to browse profiles, but the need to stay connected is in our genes. It’s no surprise Facebook has become so popular with about 500 million users across the world.

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