Monday, February 13, 2012

Facebook - Where I Can Talk To a Wall and Not Look Like an Idiot!


Welcome to the Jungle - Guns N' Roses

Facebook is like a jail. You sit around wasting time, have a profile picture, write on walls and get poked by people you barely know.


It's funny, this facebook phenomenon. Facebooking has become a verb in modern vernacular - and I have been doing it since May 1st, 2007. I had been banned from it previously by my kids because I was too old, but my son had his heart set on attending university in the fall on the east coast and we thought it would be a good and cheap way for us to stay in touch and I could keep an eye on him too. He set me up in May so I could have a few months training under my belt, besides it was better than finding him on MySpace. People my age were starting to invade Facebook anyways :)

THE BEGINNING
Yes, the Baby Boomers invaded and soon took over. For me it was a tremendous tool to know how my son was faring a thousand miles from home and I missed him a little less when I saw pictures that were posted and made myself privvy to his "wall" conversation without saying a word. I felt like a spy lol! But it didn't take long for me to figure out that if I looked for them I would find friends I had lost touch with over the years of moving back and forth across the eastern half of Canada. School mates from Thunder Bay, friends from my college years and neighbours I left behind on the East Coast and missed terribly. The miles and the years melted away with each new friend I found. But you have to keep looking because for many years, people who swore they would never be a part of it are now embracing the social experience that is Facebook. But us old fogey's have learned to share with the young and the seniors alike. These days, my favourite part of facebooking is finding people I grew up with and re-connecting with them even if we just laugh at a few old pictures together or exchange a few messages. It's nice to know we all survived those awkward high school days and to mourn together the once who have left us too early. For me there is a great group that shares pictures from days gone by so we can all privately or publicly reminisce.

THE FRIENDS
I have met some great new friends as well and keeping more recent friendships alive. It seems to me though that some people are more interested in upping their friend count then actually being a friend. I would like to have a connection with the people I add although I am guilty of adding people from a sense of social responsibility and guilt rather than actual friendship. I suppose it is probably some celebrity that count their friend among the tens of thousands, but I doubt that your average person would know that many people to call friends. Hard core facebook gamers often have very high numbers of friends because they add people who share their interest in the game. Some like MafiaWars and Farmville, require that you make requests of your neighbours in the game to move you along. Our old school chums and work colleagues are not necessarily the ones who are playing. I've had my crack at the games and find the requests and time too extensive myself, so I shy away from most. But to each his own. I can still limit how much is cluttering my home page. Well it was easier before the creative minds instituted that annoying "ticker tape" of events scrolling past. I still feel that addition is a intrusion of privacy and surprised that there wasn't more of a revolt!

THE CHANGES
And really, nobody likes to have drastic change thrust upon them just when they were starting to feel comfortable with the current layout. And who is this young hot-head Mark Zuckerberg to think that he knows what changes we would like, what changes would make our life easier and better. Lord knows you hear enough grumbling and complaining when the hint of change is in the air. Take the latest and greatest innovation - the timeline. Some people embraced the new look immediately, I sat back and hoped that I might be forgotten in the shuffle...but no...I got the notice the other day that I might a well get used to it, because the format would be permanent later this week. Argh! It really isn't the look that I object to so much although I do find it to be too cluttered and unorganized, but what concerns me more is that with each new change I worry about the less control and security that I have. That silly paradox of mine where I pour my soul and life into a blog and web page but want to control what I share in the world of Facebook. lol! But let's be real, I don't know anyone who would be willing to abandon facebook regardless of the changes that irritate us and make us feel powerless and Mark Zuckerberg knows it. 

THE STATUS
The funny thing about facebook status is that you can write something about one person and 20 others, think it is about them. There are "applications" that will make up funny status' for you when you feel brain-dead or have nothing to say. Researching a facebook related topic on Google, I came across pages and pages of sites devoted to nothing but how to write effective status' for facebook! My status' are typically very meaningful to me but cryptically so -you know me and you understand. The very obscure are often titles of blogs. Or thoughts from the deep recesses of the differently thinking mind :)

I have some "friends" on the site who clutter my view with their incessant postings of their mundane daily activities 
7:30 - good morning
7:35 - first coffee done
7:40 - first job of the day is finished
7:42 - getting dressed to go do errands
8:00 - in the line up at Tim Hortons
and on and on until finally
11:50 pm - good night 
- followed up a half hour later with another update clearly negating the notion that the person has gone to bed after a long day of updating the virtual world of their every move! I want to high five the faces of the people who comment like a mindless cheering section encouraging the insanity.  

or the real stupid status postings like
- oh wow
- I didn't see that coming
- do you believe it
(all from the same person in the space of an hour - leads you to realize that they are watching a television show and instead of talking with the humans around them, they are commenting to people who for the most part have no idea what show she is even watching. Nor do they care...lol) 

I would suggest that there may need to be an intervention there! But it won't be me hosting it. Those people have been regulated to "Only important" updates. Hmm...how does facebook even determine what is an important update? 

BEING CONNECTED 24/7/365
For the most part we are all a lot more virtually connected with the prevalence of wireless connections and Wi-Fi, most of us now compute with laptops, netbooks and tablets. Not to mention our smart phones. It is much easier to give the illusion of sitting at the computer on facebook all day long. Where once logging on in the workplace was strictly forbidden, now we are likely to find our employers have set up their own facebook page. With the demographic population now looking to facebook for not just some social chit chat but for games, news updates, discussion and dating opportunities as well as for consumer shopping, recalls and deals. There isn't too much that you cannot research or find on facebook, and there is a group for just about every interest going. A saavy business will embrace all that facebook has to offer and exploit it not forbid it. 

THE ATTITUDE
But you know the attitude towards facebook and the influence on all of society is cemented when we are told that potential employers look to our profile pages to gauge what type of an employee we might be and the police are using it as another tool in their crime-fighting arsenal. Although to be fair the moron who posted pictures of himself rioting and looting during the Vancouver riots or the burglar who seeing a computer logged on to facebook to update his status to let his friends know which house he was robbing and then forgot to log off. There is no cure for stupid!

I suppose what bothers me the most about facebook is that people take it too seriously. Two many times I have read news stories about people who have been killed or injured because they have been "Un-friended" on facebook. Exploring the site years ago as another option to the dating scene, I became afraid of deleting a person from my phone contact for fear that there could be retaliation. I barely knew this person and there are some pretty unstable fakers out there. My home phone number was visible for years with no abuse - I reasoned that if you had my last name from the site, you could use the same internet connection to look up the number on Bell's virtual phone book. 

THE DEGRADATION OF SOCIETY
There have been countless report of assault, threats and worse when someone feels slighted because they have been "un-friended" on facebook. The underlying issues that these people have saddens me as I snicker at the absurdity of it all. People have publicized feats of criminality like a banner of pride. The very forum can be an incredibly easy way to bully and de-grade people, but there is also a support group for every difference between us. The latest insanity I read about just today is the father who found out that his teenage daughter posted a letter full of profanity and anger directed at her parents who she thought were cruel. In retaliation, and to show her that what is put forward for the public to see may adversely affect the rest of her life, because it never really goes away. To emphasize the seriousness of his lecture, he videotaped himself shooting her laptop with a pistol and posted it to YouTube for the world to see. I think we can forgive the youth for some indiscretions for we have all made mistakes, but dear old dad should have known better. I think there are better ways to discuss issues before pulling out a weapon and video camera.  

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WELCOME TO FACEBOOK...The place where people add you as a friend and walk past you in the street. Where relationships are perfect, affairs are started and you look way too busy to have time to sit on facebook. It's the place where your enemies are your friends, but your friends and family block you because there are some things they don't want to know about you. It is the place where you feel the closest with people you have never met and probably never will. Better than a death in the family to get all the relations you didn't know even existed to come out of cyber space. Even though you write what you are really thinking, someone always takes it the wrong way, and people always think your status is about them. It is the place where liars can tell more lies, weak people portray themselves as gangsters, the biggest bitches and drama queens use their status to hate on bitches and drama queens (someone get a mirror quick) and loners are never alone. And for every one looking for their 5 minutes of fame, dying prematurely for any reason will get a "R.I.P." page set up for you before you are barely cold and stiff with more friends than you had alive. And no one will have the courage to unfriend you or have your account deleted. You'll live in forever in a world that isn't even real. 

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