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Face. Book.
Facebook is a strange old beast. Nowadays, Facebook is essentially a form of socially acceptable stalking. According to our incredibly scientific poll (see Bunch of Fives, page 39), 3/5 students Facebook stalk often. Before Facebook, eavesdropping was frowned upon, and following an acquaintance’s activities too closely would result in one being strongly rebuked. Poking people, certainly people who you’d never met before, could get you locked up.
But Facebook has changed the rules, at least, some of them. At some point, saying “Oh, I saw on Facebook that you went to the movies with Chelsea” in conversation became normal, rather than a freaky form of social deviancy. At some point, there became a noted difference between being “Facebook friends”, and being “real friends”, prompting a new set of Facebook social etiquette to emerge. This week, Siobhain Downes discusses Facebook and its various facets (page 26).
As well as harbouring petty stalkers, Facebook allows the most socially awkward/ objectively boring people to corner their “friends” and inundate them with more boring facts than they’d ever get away with in person. Constant status updates, constant likes of everything from “sleeping” to “that awkward moment when your friend wasn’t hacked he just likes dick” (the latter is liked by an astonishing 94,506 ‘hilarious’ people). Josh Hercus ‘psychoanalyses’ the seven worst Facebook types on page 24.
My favourite Facebook-related entertainment is the career Facebooker. Nuevo bloggers if you will. They average thirteen posts a day, are known for their casual-cool wit that belies the hours spent perfecting their word order. Example: “How can the world end in 2012, when I have a yoghurt that expires in 2013?”
 
The strange thing is, while Facebook can be great for inviting hundreds to your party and keeping in touch with friends from afar, I still kind of hate it.  Sometimes, I like to think back nostalgically to the times when “using the internet” meant playing on neopets or hotmailing my friends chain emails, warning them not to neglect to forward the email OR ELSE they would be unlikely to ever fall in love and their parents would disown them and their hair would fall out. Despite reflexively going on Facebook every few minutes, I’m constantly bored with it. Facebook is democracy at its very worst: EVERYONE gets an equal voice, and everyone’s expressing their voice all over the fucking place. More on the downsides of democracy in Two Left Feet, page 34.
ANYWAY, it’s not all about the Facebooking. In this issue, we review O Week, of both the OUSA and Urban Factory variety. Despite the grumbles in the background about the line-up, OUSA didn’t fare too badly. Check out our official O Week review on page 18. We continue our earthquake coverage on page 10, 11, 14 and lastly on 38, where Georgie Fenwick interviews Sam Johnson of the “student army”.
Hope you’re having a great second week,
Julia Hollingsworth