Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Where She Rants About Facebook

Facebook is weird.

I waited a long time to join that blasted site. But join I did, and I'll admit it was pretty cool to see what all my old friends were up to. Camp friends, school friends, people I knew through music or work... I no longer needed to wonder where they ended up, because I had a fairly freaky collection of timelines/pictures/comments to go from. That was interesting. And time consuming. Still, pretty neat.

But now that I'm all caught up, I find it a little unsettling.

I see people going from "married" or "engaged" to "single" far more often than I had expected. I have found out that former friends are now racists or bigots. Some people I've 'befriended' are actually highly annoying when given some spare time and a keyboard (if you update your status an average of three times per minute, you need to get out more). Some don't grasp the idea of giving out too much information online. Why would I want someone to know my address, phone number, employment history, marital status, religious views and sexual preference(s)? And do I really want to hand those things over to someone I barely know anymore?

For example, I just found out that my younger cousin has dropped out of high school, become a drug user and moved in with her boyfriend with a quick glance at her profile. It's all up there. The last time I saw her, she was living a pretty typical Orthodox Jewish life. Now she's adorning the net with pictures of questionable cigarettes and underage drinking (Not to mention really, really bad grammar. Staggeringly bad. I'll save the rant about what the internet is doing to the English language for another time. Do I sound like I'm 80 years old right now? Probably...).

It's all a bit weird. I guess that's part of the baggage that comes with so-called 'social networking'. Recently, I had someone say "see you on Facebook" instead of saying goodbye. Um, creepy? And fuck off?

Sorry, I don't know where this post is going. I guess I'll just enjoy Facebook while it's still around, and cheer when it falls by the wayside. Oh, and Myspace? You can expire too. Hopefully you will be replaced with a site that navigates better than a hippo on heroin.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha! My 81 year-old writer/editor father just wrote an article about how the net and new media are causing literacy rates to fall. I read a draft of it and had to tell him it's YouTube, not U-Tubes.

I was forced to finally join Facebook last month in order to admin the page for the non-profit I work for. I can't stand it.

Andrea... said...

Aw, U-Tubes. That's awesome. I KNEW I sounded like an 80 year old!

Evey said...

Yikes! My grade 8 music teacher just tried to friend me on facebook. This is what I hate -- people who are not really your friends trying to friend you on facebook. Sure, I'll add you conniving girl who stabbed me in the back in grade 6.

Amanda Earl said...

some of us use facebook status updates as a form of poetry...it's a sad addiction ;)

Andrea... said...

Haha, Amanda, I love your updates. I'm just ragging on the people that LITERALLY update a few times per minute. They exist!

Amanda Earl said...

sometimes i drink and update every time my itunes playlist changes songs ;)

thanks.