The Facebook

There are two kinds of facebookers. The reluctants and the obsessed. There really isn’t much middle ground. The reluctants are those who log on occasionally and always have an excuse for not deleting their account (“I would, but I like to keep in touch with my friends in…”). I am a reluctant, with only a couple of excuses keeping me from deleting my seldom-used account and disappearing from online social networking forever. The obsessed are those who are constantly taking all sorts of quizzes and inviting all their “friends” to play “games” with them so that no one ever has an empty news feed. I think I’d like to see approximately how much time gets wasted on those dumb quizzes each month, mainly so I can feel good about never having filled one out.

Another truth about the two different kinds of facebookers: they don’t understand each other. I don’t believe I’ll ever see the appeal of spending hours on the facebook every day, but a friend of mine once told me “facebook is like crack, once you start you can’t stop”. I suppose I don’t have the same facebook receptors in my brain that make so many other people (like my friend) feel happy while wasting time pimping out their profiles. For years I thought that it was just part of wanting others to think that they were funnier, better looking, and generally cooler than they really are. But that would be too simple an explanation, and it doesn’t account for why the addicts insist on communicating over the facebook when they have each other’s phone numbers. It never ceases to shock me when a husband and wife write love notes on each other’s walls (if you’re one of those people and you’re reading this, please stop—you’re not going to like it). Do you not know that we can all read what you write up there? And if you do know that everyone can see, do you really think we want to know how excited you are for your husband to get home from work today? “So, just don’t read it,” you say. Well, I wish that were an option, but I can’t help it—your comments are stuffed between quiz results about which “Friends” character you are and someone else’s status update: “waiting in the line at Walmart” in my “news” feed. A tip: for private conversations (or any conversations, for that matter) on the facebook, use the little “message” feature. It’s kind of like a text message or an email—the only people who see it are those who actually care. Novel, I know, but it gets the job done without so much publicity. Don’t get me wrong, I love to catch up with my friends, on the facebook or in real life, I’d like to know what you’re up to but please, send me a message and spare some of the details.