Why people are addicted to Facebook

I attended a talk about two weeks ago by a prominent professor at Columbia University. The talk was about Freedom in Cloud Computing. I decided to attend the event because I thought I might learn something valuable from the talk. Cloud computing has been a part of our lives more or less. Even though it hasn't taken its full form, it'll in a very near future. It's passed the early stages of development and entered the mid-renaissance stage. But the talk wasn't really about cloud computing. It was about the destruction of our privacy by incorporating cloud computing to our daily lives. The professor who gave the talk was one of the important figures from the group of Software Freedom Law Center. Obviously, he hates facebook and twitters. He thinks those applications have been exploiting our privacy by monitoring the usage logs which contain some personal and confidential data. His method of preventing such privacy invasions is by creating the so-called mini portable servers, which can be controlled by only us, not the giant application developer such as Google or Facebook. In theory, it sounded easy and feasible. But in practice, I personally think that it will take quite some time.

I have a couple of friends who use Facebook a lot. I don't like Facebook and I don't like Google. But I am a Google client because of the Google chat which is the only way I can connect with my family.(Other messaging clients are not allowed in my country). I have nothing against Google so far. But Facebook got me annoyed about some privacy issues and hence I deactivated mine. And I haven't had a single regret yet. But I am constantly amazed by the ways in which people are addicted to Facebook and in which people can so easily reveal about one's self and one's innermost feelings and secrets. And I started asking myself why is it that people can share thoughts on sites like Facebook & Twitters, but not in person. Sharing thoughts on Facebook is like distributing your diary book to your classmates. Granted you can control those privacy settings but how much can you really control?

I do have a couple of explanations for why people prefer Facebook and emails over phone calls.

First, it's very convenient. People are self-centered. If you want to talk to a friend, you can call that friend at your free time. But the friend might not spare some time for you. Technologies like social networking sites solve that problem. If you have to talk to a friend for 5 minutes to share a piece of information, you can do that in less time on Facebook. Of 'coz it'll take longer time for them to respond, but on average, you are reaching out to more than one friend.

Second, there's an extra medium between you and the others. You have some type of controls over that medium. If anything goes wrong, you can control it to a certain extent. It gives a person a sense of control and reassurance, because no direct attack is there. Even if it's there, there's at least something you can do about it.

Last, you don't need to wait for something to happen. You can just leave a comment, post a thought on Facebook and just leave it there. Surprising, the amount of attention that you get from others on Facebook is higher than the amount of attention you get from talking to someone in person.

I don't like Facebook. I primarily had the account so that I could keep in touch with some friends. But I realized that I could try to do it in some other ways as well. If I have to have pictures or update my profiles constantly to get my friend's attentions, then I'm sure that I need better friends.