“AMELIA JONES just can’t believe her friend would betray her like that”. “HANNAH ADAMS loves her amazing boyfriend sooooo much”. “FIONA GRAY has just shaved her legs
 lovely!” These are an honest sample of Facebook status updates posted by some of my ‘friends’. Irritating? Yes. Slightly awkward? Probably. Too much information? Most definitely.

The question is: when does this habit of publicly ‘baring all’ really cross the line? As a case in the Australian news last week demonstrates, it can be very tricky to even know where this line is. Christopher Rowe, whose family lived in Kapunda, Australia, was on holiday in Queensland when he found out about the murders of his parents and sister via the social networking site. “Can someone tell me what’s going on? That’s my parents’ street,” he wrote on his page. “My family lives on that street and I can’t get through to any of them.”

Chilling, isn’t it? But not particularly surprising. Facebook has extended far beyond its origins as a service that helps people keep up with their friends – it’s part of the fabric of our day-to-day lives. It’s the forum where even the most private people become open books – where pictures of a new baby are exhibited,  a break-up is declared or grief publically expressed. This is not, in itself, a bad thing. There is something great, for example, about being able to keep up with an old friend is doing just by having a little snoop on their profile. Love it or loathe it, as a feature of a fast-paced modern life Facebook is indispensible to some. The question is not whether we should be using social media, but exactly how we should be using it.

The recent ‘email killer’ announcement heralded Facebook’s further incursion into our lives. It’s about to launch its new messaging service, which will apparently change the way we think about communication. Instead of using e mail addresses or phone numbers, the new service will allow us to simply select people by name and message them quickly and seamlessly across multiple devices.

Will this make Facebook more all-absorbing than ever? It seems so. Again, it’s not particularly surprising. This message service is really just a culmination of everything that Facebook is about. It pays homage to the character of our society – an essentially impatient  society which often struggles to keep its nose out of other people’s business and which has become increasingly sceptical of privacy. Even for those of us in PR, drawing a line between what should and what shouldn’t be discussed publicly is near impossible. If we’re being brutally honest, rapid communication and no-holds-barred information is exactly what many of us want.

So although the case of the Rowe family is tragic, if we are going to demand lightning-speed communication, lap up gossip mags and update our Facebook status every five minutes, these cases become somewhat inevitable. For now, perhaps the best we can do is approach our continuing love affair with social networking with care. We should all be wary not to lose touch with our age-old friend – common sense!