That's what Facebookers are for

(News Terupdate) - Atma Jaya University student Fanny has 1,003 Facebook friends – and knows the figure off the top of her head. While she admits most of them are probably only acquaintances, she still likes to collect them, as accumulating friends on Facebook is like a competition among young people to see who is most popular.

Her friend Melati knows how many friends she has, and how many her boyfriend has to the exact number, “I have to know,” she laughs, “I have to keep an eye on my boyfriend.”

The students say they use the social networking site to make purchases, find information, learn about groups and publish information. They say it is an important tool to keep in touch with their old friends and reconnect with people from their youth who they wouldn’t be able to locate otherwise.

Another important aspect of Facebook is the “Facebook status update”. This offers a unique opportunity to get a message across to hundreds of people at a time, and many young people use this very public forum to display their innermost feelings.

But Facebook has its limits too. While youngsters say they can reconnect with old friends through Facebook, they also run the risk of losing their current social networks.

“I know some people who just spend their whole day browsing on Facebook, adding photos, commenting on people, which ruins their current social life,” Fanny says.

The students add it also has the ability to distract them from their studies if they don’t have adequate time management skills, and raises privacy issues.

Both girls say they have had their private pages hacked and experienced problems when accepting requests from complete strangers. No surprise there.

“I add people if I can recognize their face, or if we have mutual friends, but I don’t always know them. I’ve had problems where people I don’t know keep sending me messages and comments until I have to delete them or tell them to stop [sending message].”

Facebook has eclipsed Friendster as Indonesia’s social networking site of choice.

Will a newer, funkier social networking site make Facebook redundant?

“No way,” Fanny says. “There are too many Facebook users out there, and everyone already knows how to use it. It is too hard to get off Facebook.”

Facebook is now the most used website in Indonesia, beating search engines Google and Yahoo! with 13.9 million active users.

With the third-biggest Facebook membership in the world, after the US and the UK, Indonesia is becoming a nation obsessed with social networking.

There are over 300 million active monthly Facebook users around the world, with the number growing every second — there was a greater than 630 percent member growth rate in 2008.

Facebook is the second most popular site in the world (after Google) and approximately 30 percent of Internet users worldwide are also Facebook members.

The social networking site is now a household name. Even if you don’t have an account, you will know about it. The term “facebook” is now a commonly used verb: “I’ll facebook you the details,”
“I’m just facebooking him,” et cetera.

The social site created some controversy on its inception in Indonesia, with 700 Muslim imams drafting guidelines on its proper use, which excluded “flirting and gossiping”.

But since it has been given the all clear, Facebook has rapidly become the most popular site in the country. In fact, there are more active Facebook users in Indonesia than there are people in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Four percent of Facebook members worldwide are from Indonesia, so one must ask: What’s with this country’s obsession with social networking?

The university’s communications lecturer, Natalia Widiasari, says for many of the young people on Facebook, this kind of display is like therapy, an emotional release.

“They say things online they would not have the courage to say otherwise, this can be positive or negative,” Natalia says.

Natalia admits she has followed her student’s example and created a Facebook page.

“I haven’t had much time recently as I just gave birth to my baby, but yes, I used to be a Facebook regular,” she laughs.

The social networking site is important to the students mostly because it is a bit of fun, she says.

“For the kids, it is cool to be popular, to have lots of friends, to be known.”

The obsession starts with it taking up excess time, she says, and while she thinks it can be good for social confidence and networking, it can also be a distraction from other important tasks.

“Often when I am teaching, the students are facing me, their eyes are on me, but their thumbs are ticking away like mad on their Blackberrys, talking on Facebook.

“This means their attention is only minimally focused on what they should be doing.”

They like to have access to Facebook all the time, she adds. “When they’re eating, when they’re reading, all day if they can.”

Natalia says that while Facebook has its drawbacks, it can be an important business tool.

“For business and marketing, this is the future. Advertising and pushing products on social networking sites like Facebook is a new kind of media. It’s a good way to spread the ‘buzzword’,” she says.

When asked if the site could go against the religious beliefs of students and the guidelines initiated by the imams, she says in her experience, the students didn’t use the site for “gossiping and flirting” as was thought by some members of the Muslim community.

“It is just a bit of fun for them,” she says, “nothing untoward.”

While to some, the site is a friend-collecting popularity contest, Natalia says young people without a Facebook do not run the risk of being socially inept, or “out of the loop”.

“I think kids stick to their own groups most of the time anyway, so it is not to the detriment of those who don’t have Facebook.

“If there is something very important going on, they tend to text message anyway.”

“It can be a very positive thing in a young person’s life,” she says.

“If they are not spending too much time absorbed in it, if they are using it as a supplement to their everyday social life and not as a replacement, then it is a good thing.”

The students say Facebook is now an intrinsic part of their lives, and they check and update it a few times a day.

When asked if they would ever delete their Facebook pages they instantly reply “No, never!”

“It has taken a long time to collect so many friends, I would have to find them all again!” Fanny says.

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