What IS Facebook and Social media all about?

In this last week a friend on Facebook……. wait, a friend on Facebook or a friend who is on Facebook?  Good question.  How many real friends do you have in a lifetime anyway?

Social media confuses me.  At first it seemed quite exciting catching up with people whom I had had no contact with since leaving school.  What were they doing now?  It appeals to our natural voyeuristic appetite, and yet it feels somehow detached, like you are doing nothing wrong, effectively spying on them (even though by putting their information up there for all to see if their choice).

It started by looking through the friends list of a new contact looking for other lost connections and then moves on to looking through photographs of them and their lives.

Have we always had this fascination?

A few years down the line and I find I have been questioning the validity of social media.  Of course from a business perspective it works like a dream, I can post and tag my images and all their friends can see them.  More work comes my way.  Perfection.

But this can only happen if the public as a whole use the site.  Numbers on Facebook are dropping in the western world now, but is this because the realisation has hit that time spend on these sites is a waste of time or are there other better sites available now?

I hope not.  Most of the crap on Facebook seems to be more and more like a cry for help than anything else.  The motivational and relationship status banners that are popping up all the time simply cannot be a healthy process.  At the end of it all, who cares?  I worry that many people who read these statuses are emotional vampires who get a kick out of the fact you are feeling low.  There are so many people that enjoy watching the misery of others, do they not have anything better to do?

I decided long ago to keep personal details as far away from social media as I could.  Most of your friends are really unknown, even if you did know them as a kid.

One of the other really big problems with social media is the faux bravery it nurtures.  In the safety of your living room, you can spout all the vile poison in your head (we all have some), and yet feel safe from physical reprisals.  You can say things to people that you just would not in a face to face encounter and feel safe that there is unlikely to be any consequences.  This is a very worrying development for me, but also because mostly people try to believe all they read, in fact I am convinced that people in general are happy to believe what they are told because it is too difficult, sometimes, to question it.  OK possibly not the case but…..

So going back to my friend, then from the beginning.  A professional photographer who has decided to turn his back on the social media revolution.  Wow, I thought to myself, that is brave (or stupid).  Where are his clients going to come from?  I thought.  How strange to think that, although it does seem like it at times, social media is not everything.  There is a life beyond it.  My friend (maybe I will start to believe that this is the case), made some other very valid points with regards to the devaluing of the photographic image too.  I don’t know though, maybe the digitising of photography has sealed its own coffin.  Maybe the image will now be consigned to the disposable and temporary scrap heap.  The next amazing image on Facebook is only a couple of status updates away, after all.

Except it is not, you find some of the good image based pages and you will find that many of the fantastic images being displayed are old, some very old.  You see with all of this technology, I think we have started to miss the point about photography.  Great off camera flash is wonderful for the wedding client or those portraits in the hay field, and it is such a skill (no doubting that), but they are still gimmicky. A great image is still a great image, even if it was taken 100 years ago.  Digital means we can (and do) take more photographs, but we have always known that quality is better than quantity any day.  So by taking more images what are we missing?

I think that perhaps we are missing the connection, that is what it is all about.  A real connection and not a cyber one.