Is Facebook A Sin?

Since last Wednesday, a number of Facebook accounts went dark. It’s not an outage or a mass protest, and it doesn’t involve huge numbers but the phenomenon could shed some light on how we deal with social networking.

Simply put, some people are giving up Facebook for Lent – the 40 day period leading up to Easter, during which Christians have traditionally fasted, or more recently given up something pleasurable or distracting.

There are about 140 groups relating to the idea, none of which seems to have more than about 350 members, so Mark Zuckerberg won’t be losing any sleep over it. I heard about it from two members of my family – one approaching ordination – and it’s been picked up in various places, including the Wall Street Journal and Cnet, where the advice on how to keep your friends despite a Facebook fast included writing down their birthdays… on paper.

My first reaction is that this is a criticism of a useful social tool – what’s wrong with Facebook? I asked. Of course, that’s a misunderstanding of what’s going on. People don’t give up alcohol for Lent because it’s bad for them, or because it’s wrong in itself (there’s plenty of Biblical backing for booze).

Like most fasts, people seem to see this as a challenge. Can they survive forty days without Facebook? Are they so addicted they can’t function without it? Or are they so entangled, that all the Twitter feeds and Buzz links mean they can’t actually get free of it at all?

And it also reflects a widespread unease about the interactions on Facebook. We’ve seen escaped criminals taunting the police on the site, while those inside have scared their victims.

Organisations fear a loss of control in social networking. The UK’s Ministry of Defence found its secrets leaked there, and Cisco has warned that users could break governance rules, while Sophos thinks Facebook is a security risk.

Even if users behave sensibly there, Facebook itself appears not to be overly concerned about privacy, and Google’s Buzz also made a serious mis-step in over-sharing.  Also, people in the relaxed environment of social networking may be more vulnerable to malware.

Despite all this, organisations cannot deny the power that social networking holds due to its addictive nature. The Vatican has urged priests to embrace Web 2.0, as do businesses and their software providers. Salesforce, Microsoft and the rest have invested a lot of effort in trying to mimic the very social nature of business deals in the online space.

All this is effectively pushing two contradictory aims: giving people freedom to be creative in the way they work, and interact with people inside and outside their company, while at the same time making sure everything is safe and secure, and conforms to top-down rules about how things should be done.

IBM’s Project Vulcan, for instance, seems tailor-made to miss the point: it’s supposed to filter out “noise” in social networks, which is more or less the whole point of them.

If people are giving up Facebook for a period, it shows that all this corporate ambivalence is echoed on an individual scale. And this can only be good – because social networks operate at that level.

If there is any way to reconcile the conflicting demands for freedom and security online, it is going to be developed or applied by individuals considering their own use or dependence on the medium.