Facebook is huge. It’s taken over so much of our lives in the past few years, that we’ve readily accepted it as the hub of most our social, online activity. It’s unavoidable, in the press, on our computers, and our mobile phones. And Facebook has managed to stay at the top of our buzz list because of its ability to reshape our cultural and social norms.
Here is a list of some of the most amazing and unbelievable Facebook-related stories from the past 12 months, reflecting on the social network’s impact on our lives.
There was the 13 year-old girl that met a 19 year-old man on Facebook, proceeded to have sex with him and then hid him in the closet for at least 8 days. Then there was the couple that updated their Facebook relationship status in the middle of their wedding vows. Let’s not forget the boy who found his family on Facebook after searching for nearly 20 years. There was also the woman that got dumped on Facebook, and the boy who was able to use Facebook as his alibi and avoid charges brought against him.
Whether happy, sad, tragic or inspiring, Facebook is becoming central to multiple aspects of our social lives. Facilitating different kinds of relationships, affecting friendships and working relationships and all-out fascinating us, Facebook has become a proven tool for replicating as well as replacing a good portion of both our offline and online behavior.
The ongoing interaction between Facebook’s site and our every day lives places Facebook at a very high ranking for the position of online activity. One of the more interesting aspects of this phenomenon is the legal ramifications it has, and will continue to have, regarding our own place in society.
Utilizing Facebook to find information about a person, to meet another person or to prove that a person was interacting with the social medium carries a lot of implications about the future of our culture. What Facebook is able to do as a result is usher in a technologically-driven trend towards further adopting online and remote social networking as an accepted every day activity.
Instead of Facebook being a mere trend or a destination website, Facebook is continuously shifting our thoughts and behavior towards a more technologically-integrated form of social interaction. One day these stories won’t be so amazing–they’ll be par for the course. One day we’ll look back at these unbelievable Facebook-related occurrences and wonder why we ever made such a big deal.
Even if Facebook is no longer at the center of those discussions, it’s clear that technology and society are on their way to being so deeply integrated that the ability to provide an alibi, research long-lost families and auto-update marriage statuses online will be all but expected.
Such integration of technology into aspects of offline living will come with issues all their own, but they are issues we’re prepared to deal with from a legal and cultural standpoint. In the mean time, we remain anxious for what’s to come next year, and beyond.
