Tales from Facebook

"Facebook is now used by nearly 500 million people throughout the world, many of whom spend several hours a day on this site. Once the preserve of youth, the largest increase in usage today is amongst the older sections of the population. Yet until now there has been no major study of the impact of these social networking sites upon the lives of their users. This book demonstrates that it can be profound. The tales in this book reveal how Facebook can become the means by which people find and cultivate relationships, but can also be instrumental in breaking up marriage. They reveal how Facebook can bring back the lives of people isolated in their homes by illness or age, by shyness or failure, but equally Facebook can devastate privacy and create scandal. We discover why some people believe that the truth of another person lies more in what you see online than face-to-face. We also see how Facebook has become a vehicle for business, the church, sex and memorialisation. After a century in which we have assumed social networking and community to be in decline, Facebook has suddenly hugely expanded our social relationships, challenging the central assumptions of social science. It demonstrates one of the main tenets of anthropology - that individuals have always been social networking sites. This book examines in detail how Facebook transforms the lives of particular individuals, but it also presents a general theory of Facebook as culture and considers the likely consequences of social networking in the future."--Polity COVER 1 Copyright 8 Contents 9 Preface 11 Acknowledgements 17 Glossary 19 Part I Twelve Portraits 23 1 Marriage Dun Mash Up 25 2 Community 38 3 For Whom the Bell Doesn’t Toll 50 4 The Book of Truth 62 5 Cultivating FarmVille 75 6 Avatar 87 7 Time Suck 100 8 Getting the Word Out 110 9 It Was Just Sex 121 10 It’s Who You Know 133 11 Picking BlackBerrys 144 12 The History Woman 158 Lagniappe The Philosophy of Doubles 167 Part II The Anthropology of Facebook 177 Introduction 179 A The Invention of Fasbook 180 B Fifteen Theses on What Facebook Might Be 186 C The Fame of Facebook 227 Conclusion 238