Victims of the Facebook mirage

By Henry MuneneIt is now official that Kenyans are great fans of Facebook. There are so many disciples of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, that someone would be forgiven for saying that we have peculiar Facebooking habits.
Indeed, many people nowadays learn to go to Facebook even before they know how to browse other sites. For others, especially those who discover Facebook through the phone, there is nothing else on the Web apart from Facebook and its many attractions. It has caught on even in the rural areas.
This is a great thing as many people are able to network, make new contacts and establish other links that may translate into jobs or business. It has even been rumoured that some people met on Facebook, started dating and went ahead to walk down the aisle. All these myths about the usefulness of these sites have fuelled even more interest in Facebook, Twitter and the like.
Be that as it may, the problems that come with being a Facebook addict are legion.
First off, many people find themselves giving too much information (on Facebook) to strangers they have not met. Jimmie, a job seeker in Nairobi, has been chatting with a married woman who works with a transport company. He complains that she tells him too much about her family.
"One day she will rant and rave about the husband and how he behaved the previous night. She will then give me details that make her to suspect that the husband is seeing another woman. Then another day she tells me how she met her husband and all the things they are currently quarrelling about. After that she asks me whether I think she should leave him (the husband) or whether I think there is another woman," Jimmie complains. "I don’t know her, neither do I know her husband. So I am not in a position to tell what is wrong them!"
Real personAnd it is not only women who open up to strangers. Some men will launch into a long story of their past love lives when chatting on Facebook with people they have never met. Take the case of a lawyer in Eldoret who divorced his wife and has been spilling the beans about his ex to a girl called Janet in Nairobi. This lawyer has never met Janet, and does not know whether she is a real person or someone operating on a fake profile.
Janet says: "This guy sometimes shocks me. I do not even know why I gave him my number. Every night before I sleep he calls me to say goodnight. He won’t stop even after I make it clear that I am a bit uncomfortable about the time he calls. I tried once to tell him that he is intruding into my privacy but he retorted that he does not see any problem as I had already told him that I am single.
"He even keeps repeating that he constantly dreams about me. He recently claimed to have had this weird dream where he got a revelation that soon we would get married. He has really drained my energy and I might even consider changing my phone lines."
And with generation Y being very restless and, therefore, always wanting to change jobs, some employers are signing in on Facebook using pseudonyms just to see how loyal their employees are.
Says Simon, a manager with a media company in Nairobi: "When one of my employees handed in his resignation letter, he indicated that he was quitting for personal reasons. So I signed in on Facebook using a different name and got round to chat with him. I said that I liked his posts and would have loved to know where he works. He told me that he works with a media company but is quitting because he does not want to work for his boss. He then went ahead to list the problems with his boss (that’s me) and I could not believe the many bad things he said about me. I had to let him leave earlier than we had agreed."
profile pictures
It is not only employers who are concealing their identity to dig information about their employees. Many people are said to be requesting for friendship from their spouses disguised as other people just to ask them what they think about their spouses. Others track the lives of their ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends just to hear what they think about them.
Apart from saying too much about oneself, there is another cadre on Facebook that have two lives. Some girls search for photos of beautiful girls on the Net and upload them as profile pictures. This keeps men making advances on Facebook and requesting many times to meet the ‘beauty’. Kim, an IT intern at a local University, once met a girl who had drop-dead gorgeous images in her Facebook album. He could not believe it when she agreed to a date.
"I was terribly nervous when I went to meet her. It is not always that you get a date with such a gorgeous girl. However, I was shocked when she showed up at the hotel in Thika where we were to meet. She was an old, big woman with wisps of grey hair jutting out of a bad wig that was carelessly placed on her head. For a moment I thought she looked like my grandmother. I will never go on a Facebook blind date again," he swears.
Camps girlIt is also not uncommon for a beautiful campus girl to get swept off her feet by the vibes of a stranger on Facebook, especially if that stranger happens to have the fairy tale features of a super star, as happened to a KU girl who asked not to be named.
Listen to her story: "This dude had nice photos. In the photos he looked very handsome. He also had a way with words. I really wanted to meet him. Then one Friday evening we agreed to meet for a drink. Actually, we had agreed to rave all night. I was excited as I had waited to meet him for many months.
"Every day he would send a soothing message to my inbox or call to say hello and to drop a few romantic lines. I even sneaked out of class at times when he called in the middle of a lecture. Then I met him.
"Oh my God! He was a terrible sight. He had on an old wrinkled coat with the traditional slit at the back. His hair was grey and balding and his old shoes were so dusty with some kind of soil that you only see upcountry. He smelled of tobacco and the way I hate smokers! Then he couldn’t eat a snack without making some very bad mouth sounds. Yuck!"
Bottle of sodaSo how did she react when she saw him? "When I got to the entrance of the hotel in town where we were to meet, I dialled his number hoping to see someone resembling what I had seen in the Facebook photos picking the call. No one who looked like that was picking. I only saw one ‘mzee’ pick up the phone. Then that kamzee walked over to where I was and called out my name.
"After introductions, we headed straight to a hotel and I ordered for a bottle soda, despite the fact that we had agreed earlier in a chat session that we would rave till late. I wanted to be done with that soda and out of there as fast as possible," she recalls.
So the next time you see a Facebook photo, it would help to clarify whether the photos uploaded belong to the owner of that Facebook page. It would help to do that before showering undeserving strangers with undue compliments. It would also save you the agony of reconciling the person on the photo with the real person should you happen to meet some day. This is because with Facebook, what you see is not always what you get.