FACEBOOK

After getting my toes wet in the facebook world, I have rapidly retreated into my privacy, if not obscurity. No more Facebook for me. Facebook is a crashing bore – for the most part. While my kids have found their college and prep school friends – worthy goals. Others seem on there to blather any piece of inanity that pops into their mind. Whether anyone besides them cares or not.
Facebook defines itself as ‘a social utility that connects you with the people around you’. This could not be further from the truth. Far from serving as an umbilical cord of friendship for the socially deprived, Facebook actively damages interpersonal relationships, harms job prospects, wastes precious time, and ultimately turns die-hard users totally reclusive. It is an extension of a dreary everyday reality for people who are hobby-less, uninterested in improving their minds, less than uninterested in becoming involved with a worthy cause and with too much time on their hands. It leads your girlfriend to ask questions about your photos, your friends to ask questions about your girlfriend, and her friends to ask her questions about your friends. You don’t need this headache, nobody does. Facebook complicates our lives.
Yet prurient voyeurism and wanton exhibitionism keeps keep some people hooked, and so, day by day, they log on, hungry for more low-grade banter and silly antics. It is difficult to believe such a squalid distraction was valued at $15bn as implied by the price paid by Microsoft to acquire a 1.6 per cent stake last October – easily enough to buy each of Facebook’s members some real friends.
Facebook is a goldmine of tosh – a monument to mediocrity. Once the preserve of institutions of higher learning, Facebook now caters to the untutored masses – anyone with time on their hands and a keyboard beneath them. Not to overlook the advent of Facebook for Blackberry – further broadening the scope of Facebook’s perversion of business equipment from desktop to handheld, enabling Sharon to update her status every five minutes while ‘on the go’. Sharon is eating. Sharon is at home. Sharon is tired. Sharon is on her way to the mall. Who the hell cares? Get a life Sharon. Get a life to the person who actually cares about what Sharon is doing from minute to minute.
Are lives so empty that they need to be filled with this drivel? Are people that desperate?
Sadly the addiction runs wide and deep. Mind-numbing status updates and staged photo albums are just the beginning: uploading photos of your sister’s newborn baby for thousands of people to see is overly personal (and how has the infant consented to this?) and changing your profile picture every five minutes does not change people’s perception that in real life you are irritating and uninteresting.
If you have funds to spare and do not consider world hunger or global warming worthy causes, you can purchase ‘Gifts’ for your friends on Facebook. Of course these are not real gifts, but rather icons of a cow’s head, or a pork chop. Happy birthday – here’s a pile of sick from Anonymous. How thoughtful. I’m trying to think of another word but it seems to elude me.What happened to putting pen to paper to elegantly articulate one’s feelings towards someone one cared about? Or to the intrigue of getting to know a person’s common interests as part of a gradual process? Or to the concept of delivering a personal invitation by word of mouth or script, rather than a mail-merge? It would appear that such niceties have been relinquished along with other staples of old-world charm – the Facebook Revolution signals a whole new era of meaningless interaction.