Tanya Cooke - Help! Im a Facebookaholic: Inside the Crazy World of Social Networking

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this book, particularly my wonderful researcher Jessie McLaughlin and my good friend Jacky Hyams without whose help I would be a gibbering wreck. I would also like to thank Lizzie Heathcote and Bridget Freer for their input, and all the people who shared their personal experiences no matter how embarrassing. Finally, Id like to say a big thank you to my three children for their unstinting willingness to engage in first-hand social-networking research for hours and hours and hours Er, you can turn it off now, guys!

Like cars and mobile phones, social-networking is one of those phenomena that have become so deeply ingrained so quickly that its impossible to imagine what we did without them.

As well as being useful in a practical sense, social-networking satisfies all the basic human emotional needs communication, continuity, support. What could be more utopian than an instantly accessible online community of interconnecting networks not limited by barriers of geography or finance or social class?

From the moment it first hit the mainstream, social-networking became the Brave New World. Through it, anyone, anywhere could gain access to information, friendship groups or even their favourite celebrities without having to put their hands in their pockets or even leave the house. No wonder we all signed up in our droves. First CompuServe and AOL, then MySpace, Friends Reunited and now Facebook and Twitter all of them offering that holy grail of membership to an egalitarian, yet seemingly exclusive club.

And our appetite has shown no sign of abating.

Figures from July 2010, show that 500 million people are now signed up to that Daddy of all social-networking sites, Facebook, sharing more than three billion pictures every month and sixty million status updates a day. At last count, Twitter was boasting 145 million registered users.

A 2010 study by online PR and social media firm Simply Zesty, showed that 30 million UK residents have visited at least one social-networking site in the last four weeks and we spend an average of just over six hours a month on social media forums. Sixty-four per cent of us have our own profiles on a social network.

Quite simply, social-networking has become an integral part of the landscape of our lives.

Of course, as with any new and overwhelmingly popular phenomenon, the backlash hasnt been far behind. As social-networking has increasingly become a fixture in family lives, we worry about the effect on children, on relationships, on friendships. Divorce lawyers have warned of the dangers of hooking up with exes online, psychologists are concerned about the devaluation of friendship. As the social-networking bug has spread to the workplace, there have been questions raised about how much time employees are spending online, and how much they are inadvertently giving away to future employers.

The result is that many of us now maintain a love-hate relationship with social-networking. Were addicted to it, in the sense that checking our profiles is often the first thing we do in the morning and the last thing we do at night. Now that we can access our favourite sites from our phones, we update from the bus, from the toilet, even from the altar. We join political groups on it, we raise money on it, we share videos and photographs on it. We cant get enough of it, and yet at the same time, it scares us.

The facility to connect with the past, so we never quite leave anything, or anyone, behind, the window onto other peoples lives, the feeling that everything we do is somehow on show these things can all leave us feeling as if our lives no longer completely belong to us, that nothing is entirely private.

The sheer scale of the networks, the idea that every person and every page is another link in a never-ending chain of interconnecting links, can sometimes be overwhelming. Once we start, where on earth do we stop? Social networks offer to put the individual in touch with the world, but how do we, with our limited time and energies, handle those limitless possibilities without losing our way? And how do we achieve a balance so that our virtual lives dont end up detracting from our real ones?

There is no sphere of our lives that hasnt been affected by social-networking. Love, work, friendship, politics, music, language sites like Facebook have infiltrated them all. Social-networking has influenced the way we interact with our children, the way we find romantic partners, the way we throw parties or stage exhibitions. It has forced us to re-evaluate the nature of celebrity, and of obsession and popular culture. It has changed how we do business, how we make friends and even how we care for our pets.

We cannot escape it. And yet we do not quite understand it.

With the online world changing every day, and social media changing right along with it, no one can ever claim to fully comprehend the possibilities of social-networking, nor be fully aware of its limitations.

This book certainly doesnt pretend to be a comprehensive guide through the uncharted maze that is social-networking, but it will give you an insight into how it has changed the everyday landscape of our lives, and some of the ways in which we can gain from this new virtual world, without losing sight of whats important in the real one.

As social-networking inveigles its way into the heart of everything we do and the debate rages about whether its a wonderful tool for uniting individuals, or a sinister force by which big business can take over our lives, its easy to lose sight of the fact that social-networking, above all things, is supposed to be fun.

So lets lighten up, and log on. The ride is just beginning.

I told you never to phone, tweet, poke or superpoke me at work.

Life was hard enough when all you had to worry about was how to tell if the guy at the bar fancied you, or whether a suit jacket with jeans would leave you feeling under-dressed. Social-networking has brought with it a whole new dimension of etiquette problems. What status update to post? How often to update it? Do you put up photos of a party that not everyone was invited to? How do you deal with a friend request from someone you just cant abide?

The new rules of social-networking are a minefield and because technology is constantly evolving, they are always in a state of flux. No wonder so many of us feel like were stumbling from one online faux pas to another.

One of the problems of social-networking is the it combines that casual informality of a coffee morning chat or a pub meet-up with the permanence of the written word. So while you can get up in the morning and delete the drunken message you found so hysterical the night before, you cant stop other people from having seen it or forwarding it on to all their mates. And once something is printed in black and white, you cant tell people they misheard, or misunderstood or even flat out deny it.

Another troubling feature is the fear that our social-networking profiles will come to define us to other people, so we invest a disproportionate amount of energy and anxiety in worrying about the image were portraying. Without cheating (there exist applications such as Pimp My Profile for those suffering from extreme Profile Inadequacy Syndrome), we worry that our picture might not be attractive enough, our updates not witty enough, our friends not gushing enough to give out the right impression.