The Changing Face of Facebook: Personal Insights and Reflections

I find myself lacking a connection to Daniel Miller’s “The History of Facebook.” The article narrates one user’s (Nicole) experience with Facebook as it changed during the first 6 years of the social media platform's existence. I thought that through reading the article I would see my own experience with Facebook and the changes on the platform reflected in Nicole’s story. I did not.

Yes, she did talk about the dying off of commenting on your friend’s walls and photographs, and the pressure to perform (or, at minimum, reflect a positive outlook and the most “fun” moments of your life). However, it seems that our relationships with Facebook are quite different. 

I first joined Facebook in 2006. My crush was moving on to college, and he suggested we connect on Facebook. The platform had only recently been opened to high school students, so it was very much new to me. I had no other friends using it; most of my friends still had their MySpace, though that quickly changed as Facebook gained popularity. I don’t remember consistently interacting with my friends on Facebook during that time. After all, we saw each other every day, for 8 hours. Our lives in high school were our friends. 

I do, however, have photo albums that date back to 2006. As Facebook has gone through many changes, and my relationship with the platform and the connections I have there have changed, the sharing of photos has remained a constant for me, though they are no longer arranged in neat little photo albums or uploaded directly to my account. Photos have been the way that I have communicated with people. I love taking photos, and I love sharing them with those around me - even if many of those photos do not have people in them. Yet, even my use of photos on my Facebook differs from how Nicole uses the feature. In Miller’s article, he describes Nicole and her friends as commenting back and forth on photographs or other posts - even re-connecting through photos posted years later, “reestablish[ing] contact in a more intimate, serious kind of way” (86). This is very much not true for me. If you look back through my many, many photo albums, very few photos have comments – even those from the early days of my time on Facebook. 

The one aspect of Nicole’s journey with Facebook that parallels my own experience, is the fading of the platform. Though I still have my account, and I check my feed pretty much daily, I rarely post - except when my photos are automatically posted to Facebook through Instagram. I would say I use Facebook Messenger more than Facebook itself - and that’s just because my sister uses it to initiate video calls between her, her kids, my mother, and I. Otherwise, Facebook remains a fairly unused app on my phone. One that I find myself frustrated with when I open due to the amount of advertising and random posting from groups that the algorithm has decided I might be interested in. My feed is so full of these kinds of posting now, that I rarely see posts my friends make (if they are even making them anymore). 

And that is where I believe Facebook has become fully removed from its initial purpose. In the beginning, Facebook was about community; it was about interacting with your friends. So much so that it became addictive: “The more you put up, the more friends will comment [...] Over the years, they have given you so much comment and concern that you cannot just fold your cards when they are still up for the game” (Miller 84). Eventually, though, Facebook fell to what some may say is the ill of our capitalist culture: greed. Everything on Facebook (and all the other platforms Meta owns) is monetized: our posts, our pictures, and our data included. Advertisers and the money Meta can make through them rule the platform. Perhaps that is why younger users no longer use the platform (Orturay, 2023). In fact, at the end of 2021, Forbes reported that Facebook lost around 500,000 daily users in the last three months of 2021 (Hart, 2022). Or perhaps it is the numerous studies that have come out and shown the detrimental psychological impact social media platforms have on us. 

That said, I will likely not completely leave the platform - or the other social media platforms I’m a part of - completely behind me. I still appreciate the ability to passively check in on friends and acquaintances who live across the globe. Many of these friends I have no other way of staying in touch with; I don’t know their email addresses, and we no longer have each other’s phone numbers. Social media platforms are how we keep tabs on one another.

In the end, while Facebook may no longer be the vibrant community it once was, it still serves a purpose in maintaining distant connections. It is up to us to navigate these spaces thoughtfully, ensuring we leverage their benefits without falling prey to their pitfalls. The future of social media lies in finding this balance, fostering genuine connections while resisting the encroachment of excessive commercialization.