What Keeps Me Coming Back to Facebook

I haven’t written a blog post for a while.  A fleeting idea comes every once in a while, but my tremendously busy life in Hong Kong prevents me from putting pen to paper. Or rather fingers to keyboard.

Instead my momentary ideas are usually succinctly published in a Facebook status. Often the subject is my opinion on an important news story of the week, usually political, sometimes sports related, and very often strong and candid in nature.

And then after a brief moment of slightly heated discussion in a group Whatsapp chat over the manner in which statuses are written on Facebook, the next worthwhile subject for my next blog suddenly came to me.

Are there social rules on Facebook we are supposed to adhere to?

You see, social media has transformed the way in which we communicate. It’s given everyone a platform and an audience. A few keyboard taps and a click, and your thoughts are now potentially viewable by all your friends and acquaintances.

More importantly, it’s enabled individuals who aren’t normally adept at speaking pubic speaking, the chance to be able to do so. Kind of.

However, as we have rapidly advanced in digital communication, so too has the disagreements in how we use it risen.

For instance, the regular uploads of dishes from restaurants by so called “Foodies” is probably quite intriguing to a lot people. But at the same time, it’s a slight annoyance to me a few others, and possibly a major irritation to a small handful.

At the same time, my big statement, supposedly profound Facebook statuses on current events probably annoys a few people. But equally, there are people out there who possibly enjoy reading what I write.

That’s the problem with Facebook. It’s easy for us to write about what we think is correct, or post about what we think is enjoyable, and easily forget about all the people who see it in their newsfeed.

We lose ourselves in this digital world that we see as our sounding board, our diary, our agony aunt. Suddenly the controlled person we were in real life, becomes this unleashed, opinionated or loud person online.

Yet this problem is also Facebook’s strength as well. We find out what people are really like. We learn about aspects of their character that we never knew of before.

There have been many times where I’ve met sometimes, but not really understood the person they were until I saw their Facebook updates.

It’s not the news stories or Facebook pages that keep me coming back. It’s the people.

Facebook blurs the lines between private and public for a lot of people. I see this very much as a good thing.

So, in going back to my earlier question – should there be social rules on Facebook we should adhere to? Well there shouldn’t be. Sure, there are people who do post too much and are too frank in the way they behave online - that's myself included.

But the minute we start to try and police what goes on in the Facebook newsfeed, is the minute the Facebook platform becomes just another newschannel.

So my advice to you if, if anybody does get up your nose a bit, you have this:

And secondly if you feel the need to tell someone to stop instead of using the above function…well Stephen Fry will explain this better: