• Meaghan Morris

18 January 2010In Australian Humanities Review, Meaghan Morris tackles forebodings about the impact of the online environment on everyday life, sociability and political change

PROCRASTINATING one Sunday, I set aside a pile of print-outs from on-line media stories on the perils and inanities of Facebook and settled in for a serious read of the South China Morning Post (in hard copy, of course, with hot coffee on the side). You may need to know this great newspaper to appreciate my shock at finding therein a sententious editorial about Facebook (‘Facebook no substitute for real world contact’). While it is a Murdoch property, criticised at times for a willingness to accommodate the pressures of Beijing, the SCMP is still a hard news-focussed paper, full of serious analysis of events around the world: it does not feature frothy columnists, and celebrity wardrobe malfunctions rarely make the front page. Yet here, with no context beyond a slight story about phishing attacks on Facebook, was one of those loopy, furious moral blares that in recent years I have come to associate with Australian newspapers: ‘there is always superficiality to networking on the Web’, the writer opined. If Facebook ‘perhaps’ helps us keep in touch with friends in faraway places, ‘making new friends and maintaining old friendships requires effort, emotional commitment and contact in the real world. Facebook is no substitute for face time’.

My print-out collection is full of attempts like this to adjudicate what is and isn’t real in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Many of these pieces must be written (I surmise) by stressed-out journalists with no more access than I have to lots of personal ‘face time’. As a Facebook user whose loved ones are often very far away, of course I disagree with the editorial’s premises; anyone who thinks that social networking is a ‘superficial’ matter of clicking should explain to me (to begin with) in just what world the effort of making a photo album for friends and family does not involve emotional commitment; and in what kind of real world it counts as an evasion of contact to have an on-line party, or to send gifts, humour and words of comfort or affection to people across space and time. It would have to be a world without regard for writing and reading, obviously: no love of letters, no emotional responses to rock art and cathedrals; no crying over novels and poems, either. Come to think of it, it might be a world without great newspapers (a prospect which some pundits no doubt have uncomfortably in mind)...

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