I love Twitter. I love the celebs who feel that this is the "hip" thing to do, regardless of whether the rest of the world gives a crap who they are (I'm looking at you, @stephenathome!). I love the "real people" who happened to make a random MST3K search while I was watching "Prince of Space," and now I know exactly what they're doing at any given time (Hi, @devtony!). I love the people who started following me because I was super-excited about seeing "Beer Wars" one night, and I followed them because they were fairly interesting (@rumandcokefloat and a number of beer mags). I love the new art of Twitter satire, with fake public figures commenting on the deep shit they've found themselves buried in (@pac16conference, not to mention all that BP stuff). I love following friends, knowing that if I have something semi-urgent to say to them, I can just tweet and they'll get the message (when I lived with @darkcupid and @palintir, we communicated via Twitter more times than I would care to admit). I love experiencing world events in real time with people all around the world; where else can you talk to sports columnists about a USC game, Germans about the World Cup, and random Brits about their elections?
It's so awesome, my brain does this.
But I think what I love more than anything is that it's not Facebook. Good lord, I hate Facebook.
Why does everyone use Facebook? I realize that this is going to date me fairly accurately, but when I was starting out in college, it was a privilege to be able to use Facebook; only college people with a valid college email address were allowed into this gated community, and once you graduated, well, you needed to get a life, loser. Heck, when I joined Facebook, not every college had their own Facebook network! If you went to, say, Wisconsin or New Mexico, then tough crap for you. Then someone -- I'm assuming it was the guy at Facebook who was in charge of exploiting children -- decided that, hey, if high school students were allowed to join this network, then they could continue all through college, and thus, keep in touch with high school classmates through college!
(As an aside, this logic is flawed on so many levels. I thought this was the point of high school reunions, to "reconnect" with people you barely knew and over-inflate the importance of your meaningless existence. And honestly, if you haven't kept up with friends from high school, then either a) you've done the adult thing and "moved on" or b) you weren't really friends with them in the first place, in which case, why the hell would you want to be updated 20 times a day on what particular episode of "Lost" they're watching right now?)
At least this high school invasion made sense; after all, with the heightened emphasis on higher education in this country, at least half of these kids will be Facebook members in two years anyway, so you'd might as well let them establish their "networks" now, while they can still think of a network as a fun thing rather than a necessity if they ever want a job EVER. Then they came for the alumni, which I'm actually completely okay with, so we'll skip over that.
Then they came for the old people and the little children, and all hell broke loose.
Now Facebook is a necessity if you're clever enough to turn on your computer and access the internet. Your coworkers are on Facebook, your distant relatives are on Facebook (whom you've never met and will only "friend" you because you share a last name) -- your parents are on Facebook, for Christ's sake! Whose bright idea was this?! People now look at your Facebook profile as much as your resume when deciding whether or not you should get that $50k/year management position -- if you're as old as I am, your friends probably populated the "show pictures of me" section of your profile with JPEGs and grainy video of anything ranging from a masterful Beer Pong performance to you repelling down the side of a Seattle hotel in order to grab beer and pot from your buddy three floors down, because we didn't know that the gates would come crashing down in a matter of seconds, relatively speaking. It's like the Germans who thought they were going to win WWII; why would you hold back when repercussions were non-existent?
But honestly, probably the one facet of Open Facebook that bothers me more than most other things in life is the fact that Facebook has now replaced emails as the number one spam forum on the interwebs. In fact, many of the things I used to be able to delete without reading in email form are now being rammed down my throat in "status update" form. Keep in mind that there is a difference between sharing a link -- something Twitter is masterful at, in my opinion -- and accompanying that link with pre-packaged social commentary, imploring me to repost that exact package of wording if I agree with any of the generic crap I just read.
To recap:
Is okay, albeit poorly formatted. That may be Facebook's fault, though, in this particular case.
Is never okay.
I get that you feel strongly about mothers -- either you're a mother who's going through hell, or you really love your mother, or you have a friend who's a good mother -- but you can't make an original statement about how much you love your kids/mom/friends, without having to validate the people who literally have nothing better to do in their lives than start posts like this? Either you're too inarticulate/lazy/afraid to share your own personal opinion -- in which case I don't want to hear you anyway -- or you're perpetuating the laziness by clicking a single button to reaffirm something some moron took at least five minutes to dream up. (Both of these were on the first page of my so-called "mini-feed", by the way.)
Which brings me to what I wanted to talk about in the first place, eight million words later; why would you post something on Facebook (or even Twitter) which doesn't accurately represent you as a person? At least on Twitter, you can directly retweet something, with an implied "I agree with this/think this is funny" somewhere in there. Facebook represents everything as coming directly from your mouth -- and, while I can see the link in the former example and infer "Hey! Look at this!" I can't ever hear the words "Let's honor all mothers today!" coming from the "author" of that second comment without thinking she'd had a chip implanted into her brain by the Hallmark people. It would be like me quoting T.S. Eliot all day, and everyone wondering what the hell I was talking about:
"Hey Corey, I need you to head up this project..."
"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress..."
I don't even want to go into the idiocy of the twelve-thousand applications that all your so-called friends want you to dive into. It's not so bad today, but one day I logged onto my account (at the request of an angsty friend) and found over two hundred requests for farm equipment or cafe ingredients or mafia power-packs or iHearts or whatever else your self-harming mind can think of. It's horrid, the whole thing.
But somehow, I keep getting drawn back -- although, honestly, I think the only reason I use Facebook now is because it's a neat little column on my TweetDeck -- and it doesn't matter how much I rebel against The Man. I even have a stupid little note on my profile, similar to this one (although probably much shorter), detailing why I'll never be on Facebook again. As you can see, that worked out well. It's just that there are some friends who I like to keep tabs on, regardless of if I'll ever see them in person for the rest of my sad, sad life.
I may just start un-friending people at the first sight of spam. People might get upset, but these are harsh times we live in. Someone's got to make a stand. Or everyone can just go to Twitter and I can deal with you there.
No comments:
Post a Comment