Facebook Places: A Place For Show Offs

Is it just me, or is every update that rolls off the Zuckerberg social media production line one giant leap in the wrong direction? Places, the new location-based service that allows people with fancy phones to geo-tag themselves and their pals, was launched in the middle of last month to a mixture of confusion, suspicion, anticipation, and - from everyone over 35 - oblivious apathy.

If you don’t have a smart phone (for shame), Places allows users to tag themselves on a map and then share their location on Facebook to all of their “friends”. The service has been live for a couple of weeks now and you may have even noticed Places updates cluttering up your newsfeed. You won’t have seen things like ‘Lisa Richards is at Barnet Sexual Health Clinic‘ or ‘James Evans is at Hoxton Job Center‘, because the service is nowhere near as interesting as that. You are more likely to get thrilling nuggets of vital information like, ‘Sophie Miller is at Starbucks‘.

Facebook are selling the service with the tag-line ‘Who. What. When. And now Where‘, a sentence that will scare shit out of privacy campaigners and old people who don’t really understand social media or the purpose of Facebook - It’s an ‘opt-in’ service guys, this means people can only access information that you willingly volunteer. This isn’t Enemy Of The State; no one is even remotely interested in stealing your identity and you probably gave away more data when you filled in the application form for your Tesco Clubcard.

Facebook kindly go on to highlight the two main uses of Places, which are as follows:

Use number one is to ‘share where you are’, but if Facebook had any integrity or self-awareness at all it would be titled ‘ to show off’. This is fair enough. People love opportunities to demonstrate how great they are and how much fun they are having. So, expect to see loads of updates in which people brag about being at gigs, clubs, pubs and festivals - as if that alone was something to be proud of.

The second use, according to Facebook, is to ‘connect with friends nearby’, which sounds practical if you take it at face value, which you shouldn’t. The general idea is that you use the service to see who is near you and meet up with them, like… in real life. The problem is that both of these uses are utterly fatuous substitutes for genuine interaction and contribute to a growing culture of over-sharing that is turning social media sites like Facebook and Twitter into a sickening arenas of vapid self-congratulation.

Remember when the Myspace tagline was ‘a place for friends’? Now it’s ‘a place for spam and rubbish bands’. The same is true of Facebook. What started out as a close circle of friends has swollen and morphed into a public forum where any information you share is broadcast to an audience of everyone you went to school with, select members of your family, colleagues, people you met once in a bar, ex-girlfiends, ex-boyfriends, your actual friends, and random people who added you because they thought your profile picture looked hot (which is pronounced haaawt by the way). Your Facebook friend list is no longer a reflection of any social reality, but a ramshackle collection of casual acquaintances, a bunch of people whose names you know and a few people you actively dislike.

This recognition throws a whole new light on Facebook Places as a service. If I have to find out where you are by looking on the Facebook Places friend-finder map, I can guarantee you that I don’t want to hang out in real life. Similarly, if I have to find out about major events and recent happenings in your life via Facebook, then the reality is that we’re not actually friends. Real friends behave like the friends in Friends do. They share information by spending time together, usually in the same room as each other, moving their mouths. For example, there wasn’t a scene in Friends where Joey put out a status update saying ‘Joey Tribbiani is in Central Perk‘, which Chandler then ‘liked’ and commented on, before joining him for a coffee. Neither was there a segway when Phoebe had some time to kill, so she whipped out her iPhone and saw the update ‘Monica Geller is in her unrealistically large New York flat with only three walls‘ and then went over to hang out. And do you know why? Not just because the technology didn’t exist, but because the friends in Friends were friends and they didn’t need this artificial layer of social interaction. They just hung out.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my aversion to Facebook Places is a sign that, at 23, I’m growing old and out of touch. Perhaps there are hundreds of you reading this who think Facebook Places is an amazing innovation that will change your life. But, for me, the ubiquitous nature of services like Facebook and Twitter and the ease with which you can share every minute detail of your life means that it’s no longer about what you share but what you hold back.

Facebook proudly boast about giving it’s users the ability to tell the world ‘Who. What. When. And now Where‘, but the real question you need to ask yourself if ‘why?’ Why does everyone you know need to direct line to your consciousness - to know what you had for lunch, or how many hours sleep you had last night, or what you think of the new Mark Ronson album? If they wanted to know what you thought they would ask you, probably over a cup of coffee or a beer.