Livin' la vida Facebook

About ten years ago, Chandler Bing, our favorite cynical “Friend” forever altered the way most English-speaking individuals deliver sarcastic one-liners. His trademark emphasis on unexpected syllables changed the way we deal with the English language.
    
Similar to Chandler Bing, Facebook is one of the few and special pop culture phenomena that goes beyond the classification of fad. It has indelibly transformed the makeup of social interactions.
    
Photos are not usually developed and shuffled through anymore; they are uploaded on Facebook, commented on and liked. They are at all of your friends’ fingertips until/if you decide to remove them. The interactive nature of sharing photos on Facebook is now as much of a memory as the one captured in the photo.
    
Invitations, unless for a formal event such as a wedding or a baby shower, have gone from elaborately decorated cards to bare, efficient messages. Friendly e-mails are basically defunct, the more aesthetically pleasing Facebook inbox taking its place.
    
Philanthropic causes, academic projects and current event awareness have all found their niches in Facebook, allowing it to participate in our lives in a greater capacity than simply indulging our hyper-social, narcissistic tendencies.
    
But nothing helps define the powerful beast we call Facebook more than the revelation that Facebook’s greatest foes are three of its over 500 million users.
    
It was only after my roommate excitedly informed me that Divya Narendra and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Mark Zuckerberg’s former Harvard classmates who sued him for allegedly stealing their idea of Facebook, have Facebook accounts that I began to digest the magnitude of ‘the social network.’

Facebook is so deeply ingrained in our culture that living without it is comparable to living without a cell phone. Some choose to forego it and manage to survive, but those with ulterior motives such as promoting their career or finding a boyfriend or girlfriend know that, like it or not, there’s no greater tool than Facebook.

The fact the people who probably hate Zuckerberg the most — the people who probably experience a rush of bitterness every time they log in — are on Facebook speaks volumes about its power over our society. Because even the Winklevosses and Narendra know that, with their business and technology-oriented careers, abstaining from Facebook is similar to choosing to live under a rock.

It’s not uncommon for a business’s history or practices to rub people the wrong way, and it’s also not unheard of to boycott such businesses and turn to a substitute. Certain people have long chosen Target over Wal-Mart, Pepsi over Coke, local coffee shops over Starbucks, and so on.

But Facebook is one of the few business ventures that managed to squeeze past the moral checkpoint, taking everyone (except those with a serious distaste for social networking) with access to a computer with it. Facebook isn’t a playground for principles — it has, for better or for worse, become a lifestyle, and an overwhelmingly unavoidable one at that.

E-mail: pkansal@indiana.edu