Present TensePeer pressure is something most people vaguely remember from their adolescence, when to conform they were supposed to start smoking and have holes in their jeans, despite neither having any discernible benefits, writes Davin O'Dwyer
As we grow up, peer pressure becomes more a set of self-imposed expectations. I have recently, however, been subjected to the sort of unreconstructed peer pressure not experienced since my knees were subjected to sharp, cold winds. Instead of nicotine or threadbare denim, this time the chorus of conventional wisdom concerned Facebook, the phenomenally popular social networking site.
Friends were appalled, yes appalled, that I wasn't yet on Facebook. It was as if, with every day of brave resistance, I was becoming fainter to them, a less complete acquaintance, remembered only in dusty photos (printed, not digital) and an increasingly unused number in their phone's address book. For fear of becoming entirely transparent to them I relented, and went through the online hazing that is Facebook registration.
Now we're all familiar with the Kool-Aid-flavoured MySpace page designs and the fear-mongering Bebo scare stories, but social networking sites are taking a leap forward with the rapid rise of Facebook.
Created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 as a sort of dynamic online equivalent of the college yearbook, it was restricted to third-level students until last year. After conquering US campuses, it's now available to anybody, and its popularity is exploding, with about 25 million users now happily Facebooking away.
In most respects, it's just another "web of friends" site - you sign up and develop a friends list that quickly spirals as the web of acquaintances grows. What truly separates Facebook from its rivals, however, is the News Feed feature, added last September amid a great deal of controversy and privacy concerns. It's like a Sky News-style ticker, except instead of updating you on Tony Blair's long farewell tour or David Beckham's reintegration into the England team, the Facebook News Feed keeps you informed on the latest Facebook activities of your friends. It's hard to overstate how potentially revolutionary, not to mention alarming, this is.
Suddenly, you have your own news bulletin telling you what your mates are up to. A pal is going to a football game in Vladivostok? Let's find out more. A friend has posted a picture of a break-dancing llama? I'll take a peek. Someone you met once is having a party in the Stag's Head? Make mine a Guinness.
The sense of connectedness is exhilarating, as you reacquaint yourself with people you sometimes barely remember existed. The construction of your profile is a kind of performance, designed for public consumption. It is simultaneously gossipy and voyeuristic, which makes it pretty darn addictive.
There's surely a drug awareness chart out there that compares the addictive qualities of various narcotics, and if Facebook were smokable, ingestable or injectable, it would probably be up there with crack. It hoovers up your time. In years to come, studies will no doubt demonstrate plummeting levels of industrial productivity inversely proportional to the rise of social networking sites. China will ban Facebook and Bebo, not to restrict political dissent, but to stay economically competitive.
On the other hand, Facebook is a surveillance state's dream come true.
Intelligence agencies spend vast resources trying to spy on their citizens, only for huge numbers of people to relinquish voluntarily their own privacy online. Is it any wonder civil rights campaigners are finding it difficult to arouse broad concern over diminishing rights to privacy? These days, it seems, privacy is for when you're going to the toilet; everything else is in the public sphere.
The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously put at 150 the number of people you can actually remain friends with before your brain goes on the fritz, which means Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are probably going to be directly responsible for a lot of breakdowns in the near future.
And despite the explosion of these sites, a research paper last year concluded that social isolation is on the rise in the US - the average American has fewer friends now than 20 years ago. How many people are being duped into thinking their social circle is as vibrant as ever, just because they can keep up with the latest antics of their acquaintances with ease?
If any further evidence is needed to demonstrate that our real-life existence is blurring with a virtual world online, the decision by the administrators of Facebook to freeze the profiles of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting as a kind of permanent online memorial should be it. Facebook's policy is to remove user profiles in the event of death, for privacy reasons, but a campaign by friends of the victims succeeded in an exception being made for the Virginia victims. Their Facebook pages were extensions of their identities and personalities, it was claimed - in the words of one campaigner, "These pages are what's left of their voices".
It's the power of nostalgia as much as our innate sociability that accounts for Facebook's success. Just as we can convince ourselves that all these online friendships are substitutes for the real friendships we'd rather not see fade due to time and distance, the pages are also now serving as avatars for the dead - as long as you exist on Facebook, you will always be more than just a memory.
Shane Hegarty is on leave