Facebook world

Tracing the birth and mushrooming growth of the site and how it’s reshaping relationships and society

July 11, 2010|Ethan Gilsdorf, Globe Correspondent

Facebook has become, for many, home sweet home on the Web. It has nearly blasted MySpace and other social networking sites into obsolescence. When last checked, Facebook was, after Google, the world’s second most visited website.

But more than just market share, Facebook has captured mind share. It’s astounding how, in the mere six years since its founding in February 2004, Facebook has become enmeshed in our daily routines and has monopolized our time. Get up, make coffee, check Facebook. Time for bed, but not before updating your status one last time. More than half of its 400 million users browse the social-networking website each day. The average user now spends almost an hour per day there, scrolling news feeds, sending virtual gifts like flowers and cupcakes, and playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. Every leisure hour we spend on Facebook is an hour we’re not doing what we used to do with our down time: reading a book, cooking a decent meal, going for a walk in the woods (or at least to the 7-Eleven), even watching TV or a movie.

As David Kirkpatrick writes in “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World,’’ Facebook has led to “fundamentally new interpersonal and social effects.’’ That’s some understatement. Facebook has not only triggered semantic shifts like twisting the word “friend” into a verb and coining a new term, “unfriend.” It has also redefined what we mean by friendship. As Kirkpatrick smartly notes, when Facebook was first dreamt up in a Harvard dorm room, it was envisioned as a tool to complement relationships with real world pals, not create ones with people you’d never met in the flesh. Now it’s used as much for self-promotion and political activism — think of the Obama campaign’s mastery of the medium — as for networking and tracking down old flames. At last count I had 756 Facebook “friends,’’ and another 591 “fans’’ of my book. But how many of these friends or fans could I count on in a time of crisis? In cyberspace, no one can hear you cry (unless you’re Skyping).