Has Facebook killed the joy of blogging?

I am back to blogging after a seriously long hiatus of 2 years. Lets just say that this blog's loss has been FB's gain. Somewhere along the way, FB morphed from a way to connect with old friends to a lazy person's blog of one liner's and pics. Could FB's rise be the death knell of blogs? Granted, its a lot easier to post on FB than on any blog. However, some of the personal information being shared by seemingly sane folks on FB borders on freakish! Why is FB a safe environment to spontaneously express too much personal information, when a roomful of friends at a house party is not? I gave this some thought during the boring part of my cardio-workout today, having run out of more exciting things to focus on. 

Here's my take on it:

Its that relentlessly blinking cursor on the FB status line! It seems to have a hypnotic effect on even the sanest and steady sorts. The compulsion to 'update' one's status has taken on addictive proportions for some of us. Pray tell me why would anyone care if you overloaded on sweets over the weekend or for that matter if you are stuck in a line at some consulate. Totally pointless to advertise that kind of information, isn't it? However, we would be totally incorrect in this assumption. We do give a damn and that's the beauty of FB. The clever folks at FB figured out that humans are essentially social animals who are hopelessly addicted to voyeurism. FB has become a medium for humans to send out 'breaking news' alerts on their private lives to their tribe members, who dutifully respond with wisecracks and comments. Dr Eric Berne, the late Canadian psychiatrist would have described FB as a giant cyber-factory of 'transaction and strokes' within the context of his psychological framework. But let me not get distracted by Dr Berne's psychonalytical framework, which by the way is brilliant in its simplicity and everyday application. 

FB in its current avatar is a platform to convert all our 'friends' into a giant peanut gallery with a voracious appetite for titbits of each other lives. We feed periodically them with 'updates' consisting of snippets of the relentless inner dialog coursing through our minds, in the vain hope that they would at least be mildly amusing to evince a response. The 'attention exchange' makes all of us feel like minor celebrities for a few fleeting moments or hours, and therein lies the users' payoff, and the key to FB's profitability.

For those of you FB regulars who are now shifting uncomfortably in your chairs reading this, I have a small confession. I too have fallen victim to the FB addiction over the last few weekends, wasting away precious hours staring at 'updates' in my FB page, instead of being out and about. When I caught myself checking my FB page today before breakfast, I realized that I was developing a facebook problem, which is why I am back to blogging as a way to wean off Facebook. If this doesn't work, I am deleting my FB profile!

Comments

[Pratik]

Hi Vikram: I was subconsciously looking for a "Like" option to press after reading your blog, which I very much liked! I guess I have a facebook problem :-)

I suppose people like to read other people's status updates (and people like to post theirs) just like people like to read (and write)autobiographies and blogs. Other people and their lives are always and will always be interesting to us. We will always invent ways in which we can learn more about each other, even as the distinction of what is personal and public continues to diminish...

[Shefaly]

Inductive reasoning comes with its own flaws, it has to be said. Just because you found FB interfering with your blogging does not mean it is a wider problem. In fact most of my regular blogger friends, who are on Facebook (not a very large number since most of my contacts belong in either one or the other, not all, of my social networks), are blogging as regularly and able to generate dialogue both on blogs and on their FB walls.

Those, in whose lives I have no interest whatsoever - and this does not mean I need to or care to know everything they do - do not enter my walled garden on Facebook.

We can blame the tools all we want. In the end, we need to exercise our own discretion with the tools at our disposal.

PS: Oh by the way, you CAN control what people see and do not see on your Facebook exchanges. And most of us do. So there is no need for anyone to squirm unless the squirming comes from realising that one did not know that such "differential sharing" was indeed possible on Facebook. ;-)

[Vikram]

Shef,

I agree to your point on FB's differential sharing feature. In fact, I have found the said feature quite handy for my own posts on several occasions. My point is that FB is doing to blogging what email did to letter writing. With ever-shorter forms of expression like Twitter gaining ground, the question that comes to mind 'Is the market for internet based self-expression expanding or being cannibalized by shorter and easier tools?

[Vikram]

Pratik, this post was entirely inspired by your hilariously funny efforts to fight the gnawing compulsion of posting an update with no witty inspiration at hand. I should give you credit on FB for this!

[Kadhyaa]

Hi Vikram,

First time here and the reason being here is the topic which u hv written about. FB has changed mylife a lot too. as the first comment goes above the first thing i serch is a "like" button.

However i hv been a blogger since 2007 (though the platform and the topic of blog is very different) and till today the FB cudnt take it completely from me..and i still feel both has its own limitatios and scopes...and for me it has allowed me to get introduced to many of my blogger frnd :)