Facebook rant, part 1

Every minute on Facebook....

• 510,404 comments are written
• 382,861 posts are liked
• 231,605 messages are sent
• 135,849 photos are added
• 98,604 friendships are approved
• 82,557 statuses are updated
• 79,364 wall posts are written
• 74,204 event invites are received
• 72,816 pages are liked
• 66,168 photos are tagged
• 55,304 links are shared

(Source: TIME Magazine graphic with information courtesy of Facebook)

Mark Zuckerberg fascinates me. It started with seeing The Social Network and learning some background information in fiction-movie form, and continued with a TIME Magazine article published in December. Zuckerberg was named TIME's "Person of the Year," so practically a novel was written about him as an article. He did, for the record, make probably the largest contribution to social media and society this decade, if not century. His invention did not even need to be advertised to spread the word in terms of popularity. My earliest memory of Facebook was being a 7th grader at my friend Michelle's house, watching her older brother who was a freshman at American University use the site. He said we could look forward to our college e-mail accounts for the sole purpose of using Facebook. And we did. Obviously, part of Mark's success.

Imagine creating something and watching every minute decision you make affect the entire world. It makes me cry of joy to see ideas I brought to the organizations I was in at GBN be carried on, but to see 550 million people discuss the ramifications of your decisions? It's phenomenal. One in every dozen people on the planet Earth has a Facebook. Seven hundred billion minutes are spent on Facebook each month. Two million websites are integrated with Facebook, and 10,000 new websites integrate with it each day. To be part of the team behind this massive societal shift would be amazing.

Mark is portrayed as a smart little boy throughout his Facebook article, for the most part on the nerdy rungs of the social ladder. His bar mitzvah was Star Wars themed, and for fun in his young years he performed some interesting computer tricks. He set his sister's computer saying that if she didn't come pick something up in 4 seconds, her computer would self-destruct. But he is the one whose decisions and daily work have been engrained in our heads throughout the past 7 years. I myself have had a Facebook profile since the summer before my sophomore year of high school, when Facebook was opened up to high school networks. As a centerspread for the Torch, my high school newspaper, I designed Facebook profiles for the graduating seniors and tried my hardest to mock the logo and the font. These small things have an effect on our everyday lives; we remember these decisions. Mark's thoughtless decision to create a blue and white logo was due to his color blindness to green and red, and now the world associates the faded shade of blue with Facebook. That's pretty impressive.

His most intelligent idea that has contributed to today's changes is as follows: "The fact that people yearned not to be liberated from their daily lives but to be more deeply embedded them is an extraordinary insight." Think about this statement. People are obsessed with themselves and their personal image. Instead of being free from stressful thoughts and relaxing, we would rather stress over placing emphasis and efforts on making ourselves appear great to others. It makes sense, because stressors can arise from being looked at the wrong way. But who thinks this much? Mark Zuckerberg. It is not the idea that he thinks this much, but that he did something about it by letting people control so many aspects of their "profiles." On today's Facebook (or at least the one I have right now, until the next change comes up), you can choose which of your information is on the side box on the left right when people click on your profile, and what only shows when they go out of their way to click "Info." For example, as a single lady (thanks Beyonce for forever keeping that song stuck in people's heads), I can choose to have Single on my front page in addition to a tab so people see it on their first quick glance. It sounds like a little, but can mean a lot in the long run. So it was a lot for Mark to think (even collaboratively) of such ideas of why people care about themselves so much.

The most photo uploads Facebook has had in one day so far was Halloween 2010 with 339 million photos. The day after, 305 million photos were uploaded. Why Halloween? This allows part of Facebook's target market, the YAYAs (MOJO advertising group's terms for youth and young adults) to show off their costumes, beauty, friends and social lives. So uploading these photos is a manner of investing time into making yourself look good to your network. I'm sure if you could count the number of times people just glance over their own profile, it would be infinite. People have endless options of to give off a very specific image about themselves, from the pages they like, to the photos they upload, to their status updates, to what they write on someone's wall to broadcast it rather than in a message.

Therefore, we as individuals are all contributing to these statistics. Facebook accounts for 10 percent of all internet visits and 25 percent of pageviews in the US (Source: USA Today), so we obviously care this much about how we appear to everyone else. Next time you log on Facebook, thing of your intent for signing in, its purpose. Are you checking information on someone's profile, using it for communication or impatiently waiting to tell the world something cool you did with a status? Maybe thinking of its purpose will help you get over this insane habit.

(More to come in Facebook rant, part 2)