I am sure few but those strange hermits who still persist in ignoring the internet have failed to notice a recent phenomenon called Facebook. This site has followed in the footsteps of it’s spiritual ancestors Livejournal and MySpace to become perhaps the premiere social networking tool on the internet. It is not quite a blog, not quite a friend finder, not quite aforum and not quite an email service. Rather, it is a sleek amalgam of them all.

I will admit even myself, normally to be relied upon for my resistant attitude towards new internet trends have a reasonably thriving Facebook account. Indeed, I felt compelled to join the swelling ranks of this service. Within a week I had encountered people I had not seen for decades, seemingly randomly. I had been invited to be a Vampire, a Zombie AND a Werewolf. I have been licked by near strangers. It is all very strange.

In Australia, where Facebook Membership has increased almost exponentially since it’s inception, a recent article estimates that $5,000,000,000 is being lost in productivity per year due to employees “facing”, as I choose to call it at work.

Clearly, Australian economists feel this could prove to be a problem. The problem is more than likely hardly limited to Australia.

This all makes sense – every new method of communication with other (even random) people will tend to make people enthused. We are highly social creatures, and, as I keep stating, we live in the information age. Some of the best information is what people who you only sort of know look like and whether they are ‘in a relationship’.

Facebook has become ubiquitous enough that when I meet new people they ask me if I Facebook before they ask me what my phone number is (or even the previous standard, my email). Facebook has also managed to become a verb, which is always a bad sign. I feel this could become an issue. But of course, this issue has been dealt with before by companies attempting to convince their workers to actually work. Indeed, I would dare say the IT industry has been repeatedly dealing with this issue since its inception.

It will not destroy industrial productivity. But, it will annoy many supervisors and please many slackers before people forget about it (no doubt in favour of the next big social network). There is no reason to panic. We will endure, as we always have.

Comments

comments