Technology Diary 1: Facebook

For this post I decided to go for more of a software aspect of technology rather than the more concrete hardware. Facebook, with over a billion users, a movie about it, an extremely valuable stock, and a key part of the Millennial generation’s social fabric, it is a piece of technology that plays a major role in our society.

When most people interrogate Facebook, they often look to its role in cyber bullying, political revolutions, online sexual predators, or just the way its changed the way that people communicate. Absent from the mainstream discussion is gender. Sorry to disappoint some readers, but I am not going to talk about how Facebook enables feminists around the world to unite and build an online coalition to seek a more egalitarian world, this may be true and a point of very interesting and important discussion, but I want to first address the elephant in the room, the way people of different genders use the website.

Disclaimer: The statements I am about to make are obviously not absolute and there are tons of exceptions. These are just trends based on what I’ve observed with my friends use of Facebook.

Growing up and to this day, I’ve always had a lot of friends that were girls (this is probably because  I have a large group of all-girl first cousins whom I’ve always been very close with). As a result I’ve been able to gain a better understanding of the differences between the ways women socialize and men socialize, this knowledge extends to social media.

When I use Facebook, as most other men do as well, I use it primarily as a means of communication. I keep in touch with friends from high school and abroad, I share the occasional funny or interesting video or link, coordinate an event, and comment on the occasional photo or post. Aside from that I post pictures of vacations or significant events in my life, but not excessively at all, and I rarely ever tag a picture of myself.

For girls, on the other hand, Facebook is far beyond just a means of communication, it is a determinant of  social status and hierarchy. Because of this the ways girls use Facebook is much more calculated. For example a fair amount of my friends have had mini crises over what their new profile picture should be out of fear of being judged. Moreover, there is apparently a set of etiquette for girls on the website that does exist for guys. It is an expectation for things like commenting or liking other girl friends’ profile pictures and praising them on their attractiveness. If this expectation is not met it is taken as an insult or betrayal.

Because of the lack of expectations for me, as a man, Facebook can be a place of relaxation, procrastination, distractions, and a nice way to just veg out. I cannot imagine that this experience is identical to girls that practice the mainstream Facebook expectations, and it would seem that it could just be an added form of stress. (Maybe this is why I’ve noticed that out of my friends who deactivate their Facebook accounts, the majority of them are girls)

Overall, it seems that a certain set of expectations exists for women (specifically teenage girls) on Facebook that does not exist for men. This creates almost two different Facebooks, divided by gender into different uses, user expectations, and codes of conduct. And it is  proof that no matter how our technology changes, our cultural norms and expectations will always continue to shape it.