I wonder who is a friend on facebook, and is facebook our friend?
The amount that can be sucked into making updates on facebook is crazy!
It is a great tool; however, when we foregoe maintaining real relationships to build our estate in farmville or to increase our virtual friend count, there is something amiss.
I go back to a cursory view of Maslow’s needs. In North America and Western Europe our basic security needs of food, shelter and sleep are covered. It appears that we have this insatiable social appitite that needs to be fed before we can move up the chain to self actualization. My guess is that facebook is to friends as soda pop is to our diet – a quick sugar fix without really meeting the long term social health or fitness concerns. This has implications both in our private and work lives.
Some businesses are all for social media in the hope that they have found another platform to propogate their message to buy their product or service. For many other businesses Facebook is an enigma. People use it as their primary form of communication and the business has no voice in that conversation. Worst yet, their staff spend time during the work day with a browser parked on facebook minimized so that the supervisor can not see. Unfortunately for some staff, the network technician has the technology available to track their online activity!
I could rant about the “evils” of Facebook, but that would be pointless. A few years back I spoke at a school convention in Sacramento on internet content filtering. Next door MySpace (remember them?) was hosting a conference. Back then I noted that it was not MySpace that was the issue – it was a tool and another one would come along and it did. The issue for most high school teens, is that with their basic security needs met, their entire lives depend on their social needs. The challenge for educators and employers is to motivate those within our sphere of influence to transcend their current situation and “needs” to a bigger, greater vision.
When I see myself as a critical part in a project or a mission I will not have time to update my facebook status about the latest meal I ate or about the dog’s mess on the rug! I will trade my time spent on farmville to engage in helping others get access to clean water or micro financing an agricultural project.
For my business and school clients who do not have the tools to motivate those in their care to a higher or better use of facebook I will provide a link below to band aid the problem (block facebook)
http://www.netsentron.com/block-facebook/
Tom Kobelt
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