Facebook - why do we hate it?

Facebook is the world's most popular social networking site. It has over 400,000,000 members and it accounts for 4.8% of all internet bandwidth usage. Most people (in the developed world and, increasingly, beyond) check it, most days. Some people whinge about it incessantly, some couldn't live without it - often these are the same people - but very, very few can resist the temptation to sign up.

Personally, my feelings about it are very mixed. The time I spend on Facebook is clearly not time spent advancing my career, unravelling the mysteries of mankind or creating beauty. Often the experience leaves me irritated, sometimes apoplectic. The vast majority of what slides its slippery way down my "News Feed" is inconsequential to the point of tedium. Maybe your friends are expounding theories of existence or crafting delicate haikus but predominantly all mine seem to offer is a whinge about their health or an unwanted (and unwarranted) eulogy about their offspring. Often the best you can hope for from a bout of social notworking is to be mildly titillated by someone else's misfortune.

All of which raises a crushingly obvious question. If this is the case, Tom, you fool, why do you log in at least fifteen times (admit it) every day? Why do you squander so many of the rapidly-elapsing seconds of your precious life so eagerly, on an activity which leaves you feeling so disgruntled?

Well thank you, dear reader, for asking such a frank question, but I don't think I know the answer. Maybe I like the pointlessness of it all. Maybe the momentous, world-shaking gravity of coding HTML leaves me craving superficiality. Maybe not. I could pretend to you that in my job, I need to stay abreast of the world of social networks but that would be disengenuous.

The fact is, I spend time on Facebook for the same reason I spend time in the pub. I like my friends, lots of them (babies aside) are funny and all of them have interesting lives. Also, lots of them live a long way away from Hong Kong and short of emailing, phoning or (heaven forfend) writing to any of them, Facebook is a very convenient way of staying a little bit in touch with a lot of people.

Of course an email is worth more than a wall-post (or a poke, possibly the most piddlingly irrelevant form of human interaction ever devised, and yet who can deny, fairly compelling). A 'proper' email requires the genuine commitment of at least fifteen minutes, which, when granted exclusively to its recipient, is a rare gift in these days of frenetic distraction and short-termist self-gratification. Most of us know too many people to effectively correspond with more than a couple of them, so Facebook allows us to hedge our bets and communicate less stuff to more people.

Of course it has other uses. I have found - and been found by - countless old friends, from whom there were often good reasons to drift but in one notable case an old friend I thought I had completely lost touch with managed to dig me up on Facebook, invite himself over to Hong Kong and drink me under the table with genuine panache. This really was a case of actual value added to my life by this website, this toy, that has crept so quickly into our lives.

Perhaps there is a danger that once a distant friend is on our list of Facebook buddies we no longer feel the need to make any effort with the friendship. He can see my status updates and browse my holiday snaps, should, for any bizarre reason, he feel compelled to do so, so why do I need to write him an email? But, in a world without Facebook, would we really have emailed all our friends anyway?

Facebook is as dull, repetitive and exhibitionist as your friends are; it's not Facebook that whinges about being ill and goes on and on about its babies. Time Facebooking is comparable to time spent in the pub. It's not advancing the cause of mankind any more than having a coffee with an old friend or a drink with a girl you fancy, but it is clearly answering a very human need: the need to be a part of a community, to run with the pack, and to interact a little bit with some other human beings.