My love/hate relationship with Facebook opened up a whole new can of Haterade today.

My heart almost stopped this afternoon when I took a peek at my account (yes I was at work, but i was just checking), to see that my cousin had posted the following status update a couple of hours earlier:

“… has had some bad news. His uncle died earlier today mid conversation. Cause still unknown.”

I managed to keep myself composed despite feeling like I was about to pass out, quickly doing mental calculations for the Berlin-Sydney time difference, checking my phone, trying to rationally talk myself out of tipping over into panic mode, while feeling the sting of the absurdity of the situation: this CAN’T be how I find out that my father has died, can it?!

Well, as it turns out, Papa K is still safely with us – hi Dad! – and the post referred to an unfortunate uncle on the other side of said cousin’s family tree. As relieved as I was, I could only hope that no loved ones of this poor man had to learn of his demise via a wall post. Imagine! But now the false alarm is over, I’m left wondering: when exactly it became acceptable to communicate such sensitive news to your friends via a wall post, wedged between your youtube videos and Farmville updates?

So much has been documented about Facebook’s grey-area policies on user privacy and the ownership of personal content. Stories of Facebook encouraging corporate time-wasting, enabling teen cyberbullying, and cases of I-shouldn’t-have-bragged-about-chucking-a-sickie-on-my-wall-today-because-I-forgot-I’m-friends-with-my-boss idiocy are reported almost daily. These are all vital factors in monitoring and documenting Facebook’s immediate impact, but I’m more interested in how Facebook and other social networks are changing the ways that people instinctively interact.
When you create a character in a role-playing game like Second Life or World of Warcraft, there is a line (no matter how thin) between your real self and your virtual self. Facebook is a much murkier proposition. It’s you, but it’s not the you that occasionally takes an unflattering photo (untag!), or the you that deep down thinks your friend’s new baby is odd-looking, or the you that is just dying to have a right old whinge about your boss/partner/ mutual friend.

But sometimes, it is the you that will casually mention a relative’s passing, without considering who might be reading it, and it’s sometimes the you that’s comfortable uploading quasi-soft-porn stills from your loved-up honeymoon. It’s the you that will document a blow-by-blow implosion of your relationship, revealing every new detail regarding when, with whom, and how many times your beloved cheated on you. It’s the you that will chronicle your heartbreaking, repeated failed attempts to conceive a child, and the you who will joyfully publish a graphic ‘delivery room’ series of photos, caesarean in action, brand new babies covered in birth muck*. Yeah OK, these are all extreme examples, but they’re also all real examples that have awkwardly popped up in my news feed during my Facebook life.

Facebook is so genius in its simplicity, it’s pegged as a private space to maintain connections or just casually interact, and surrounds you with familiarity – faces, names, images – encouraging you to confide like you might do in person, via email, or over the phone. But depending on your vigilance about your own privacy, it’s also completely insidious, easily becoming an exercise in pure, untraceable voyeurism, or the cause of embarrassment due to volunteering too much information. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has had to delete a drunken wall post, a too-sassy reply, or a too-compromising photograph once reconsidered with a clear head.

Now that Facebook is a part of our daily lives, I hope that people will continue to think critically about what they’re contributing to it and getting out of it, and about how it’s affecting the way that we interact online generally, particularly at the expense of real life eye-to-eye communication. In the meantime I’m still left with the same question: is Facebook the appropriate place to broadcast very sensitive or personal information? For what it’s worth my answer is a resounding ‘no’; my general feeling is that is if I wouldn’t cast this information off-shore, untethered, into the vast sea of the internet, then I have no business posting it on Facebook either. But who’s to say what’s right? In the meantime, the discussion continues, and I’m curious to know: what do you think?

* (for the love of little green apples, people, please STOP with these!)