14 January,2011 06:52 AM IST | | Prahlad Nanjappa
Facebook has changed most of our lives even more than one would care to admit. And the minority of people who swear off Facebook are simply too insignificant to even be taken into account. Marketers want to include social networking into their brand plans. And every brand manager worth his rate of return (ROR) gets highly excited with his page on Facebook ufffd that only he and his relatives are fans off.
The evolution of the world isn't anymore divided into BC and AD. Its BFB (Before Facebook) and AFB (After Facebook). The post MTV generation has long faded into grey-hairdom. Today, Gen FB has a new language altogether. On Facebook, you don't say hi, you poke someone. You post on walls (and would that last sentence have made any sense pre-FB?). You comment. You like. You superlike. You even unlike! (And the Word edition I am using right now, does not even recognise unlike!)
Facebook takes the concept of friendship and stretches it to an all-encompassing universe of people you have probably met through work or over a drunken night ufffd and would never ever have dreamt in keeping in touch with, but who are now popping up out of the woodwork ufffd all ready to be "friends" with you. Waking up the next morning with someone you don't recognise next to you has taken on new shades: these days you go
on a bender and then wake up to friend requests.
Now Facebook becomes the only place where you can actually rape someone and get away with it. And they even have a word for it! Take someone's trip when they leave their accounts open, change their status or add in a rude comment and facebookers won't be happy without calling it fraping; a word that derives from a combination of Facebook and raping. Urban Dictionary feels this is a phenomenon so common and significant that it actually has a definition for the word : "Profile pictures, sexuality and interests are commonly changed however fraping can include the poking or messaging of strangers from someone else's Facebook account."
I, personally, have been fraped so many times, I can't even begin to spot the criminals at the line-up identification parade. I have now learnt to close my account before I head off for a corridor coffee. In the days of yore and kept-open accounts, I wouldu00a0 return post-espresso to find 35 comments on something
incendiary that I never posted on my page.
This is one rape that will never get a penal code attached to it. Unless Facebook comes up with its own: The Fenal Servitude?u00a0
