Facebook has become such a pervasive force in modern society that increasing numbers of employers, and even some psychologists believe people who aren’t on social networking sites are “suspicious”.
The German magazine Der Taggspiegel went so far as to point out that accused theater shooter James Holmes and Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik have common ground in their lack of Facebook profiles.
On a more tangible level, Forbes.com reports that human resources departments across the country are becoming more wary of young job candidates who don’t use the site.
The common concern among bosses is that a lack of Facebook could mean the applicant’s account could be so full of red flags that it had to be deleted.
Slate.com tech reporter Farhad Manjoo wrote in an advice column that young people shouldn’t date anyone who isn’t on Facebook.
“If you’re of a certain age and you meet someone who you are about to go to bed with, and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag,” he says.
Farhad Manjoo points out that these judgements don’t apply to older people who were already productive adults before social media became widespread.
The tech news site Slashdot summed up Der Taggspiegel’s story about social networking as “not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer”.
It points out that James Holmes, who is accused of killing 12 people and an unborn child and wounding 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people with a car bomb and mass shooting, did not use Facebook and had small online footprints.
Anders Breivik used MySpace and James Holmes was reportedly on the hookup site Adult Friend Finder.
Psychologist Christopher Moeller told the magazine that using Facebook has become a sign of having a healthy social network.
Psychologists have noted that James Holmes, along with several noted mass murderers, have lacked any real friends.
And this is what the argument boils down to: It’s the suspicion that not being on Facebook, which has become so normal among young adults, is a sign that you’re abnormal and dysfunctional, or even dangerous, ways.
Not being on Facebook is just a sign that you actually have your own life instead of being stupid sheep who goes with the mass. This article is total utter rubbish written probably just to boost falling Facebook stock price.
This article is complete rubbish. Being on Facebook doesn’t indicate you have real friends. It indicates your pathetic need to validate your otherwise worthless life by gaining the acceptance of total strangers. Might as well walk down the street handing out dollar bills. Why would any sane person expose their lives to complete strangers? The shrinks that came up with this crap are completely caught up in this technological phenomenon and are misidentifying mass behavior with normal behavior. In Germany during the late 1930s and early 1940s it was normal for Germans to be members of the Nazi party. These same psychologists would probably say that it was the abnormal miscreant who DIDN’T join the Nazi party, rather than independent, free thinking people who had their own sense of morality and recognized the Nazi’s as the barbaric, insane people they really were. And all the other Germans who stood by and aided the Nazis (and Austrians and Poles) were also joining ‘normal’ mass behavior.
Bad research. Breivik had, not one, but two accounts on facebook and one on the twitter. Google “Breivik facebook” and you’ll see some screenshots (accounts were deleted at once).