Thursday, February 16, 2012

Ugh, Facebook.


I haven’t logged onto Facebook in over a week (sorry if I missed anyone’s birthdays), which as sad as it sounds, is both an accomplishment and marks me hitting another stage of my life. There are so many things about Facebook that irritate me to the point that I am actually 0.000004 seconds from deactivating. 

The main problem that I have with Facebook is that I joined when it first came out, which was junior (?) year of college.  This was the era of the first-mover-Facebook-mania: In other words, if you saw someone at a frat party one night who happened to be your freshman roommates’ boyfriend’s best friend’s brother, you were immediately Facebook friends by the end of the night (and this was quite a feat since this occurred even before the existence of smart phones).  So I have way too many of these clowns as my Facebook friends and it’s to the point where if someone says, “Oh Amara! You know Joe such-and-such?” that 9 out of 10 times I’m thinking, “Wow, I do?” And then I look at his profile picture, think to myself that maybe he looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t remember anything about him nor how I could possibly know this individual. So I have some absurd number of friends (900+?), most of whom I don’t even know exist, nor do I care.

So when some major event now happens, like Jeremy Lin leads the Knicks to another win – I get this explosion of a Facebook newsfeed where 800+ individuals are utilizing every imaginable conjugation of Lin’s name to say the exact same G—Damn thing: “This is Linsanity!!!!” “We are in the midst of Linsania!!!!” “Knicks are Linning!!!!” 


Like seriously?! Is this necessary? Are you supposed to be showing us all how witty you are by coming up with this ‘novel’ conjugation of a last name? And if you saw that 800+ people have written the same exact thing before you did, is it absolutely necessary to jump on this bandwagon?

And then when it’s a special occasion- Ok, let’s take Valentine’s Day, for example… On such a day, the 400+ females on my newsfeed apparently feel like it is 100% necessary to promote the large bouquet of flowers that they received at work from their significant others along with several photos of said bouquets and the associated [and dreaded] social-media-PDA captions…  Captions like, “Look at what my baby got me!!” “Muah!!! I looooooove himmmmmm!!!!” “Best boyfriend in the WORLD!!!!!!!!!!” “HUGGIESSSS!!! KISSESSSSSS!!!” “Best Valentine’s Day everrrrrrrrrr, baby!!!”

 Wtf? I can’t look at this four-hundred times in a row. I’d rather stab myself in the eye with a pencil. It’s disgusting.

Ok, yes, I did blog about receiving a heart-shaped pizza on Valentine’s Day, but I reserved it for the 20 or so of my closest friends/coworkers that I speak to on a day-to-day basis, who care about my life and thoughts enough to read my blog (or at least I hope, lol – please inform me if this is not the case).

I was talking to Julie about this today and we were saying that Facebook has evolved into this new type of monster.  It has turned us into a society of self-important, self-consumed people that think that Facebook is a means of receiving validation for our actions from the 800+ people that we’ve ever encountered in our life.  It irritates me when I realize that I’ve absorbed myself into becoming a part of this narcissistic society.

Yes, there are definitely people that utilize Facebook as a useful, collaborative tool (e.g. as a catalyst for the Egyptian protests, etc.); However, the 95% that utilize this resource as a self-promotion mechanism instead, overshadow my newsfeed so that I don’t even get a chance to see information from the ones that actually use the site valuably.

I’ve decided that I’d rather get my news from following the WSJ, Reuters, BBC News, The Economist and the Financial Times on Twitter than from Joe-such-and-such who I can’t remember enough to determine whether he has any type of credibility in telling me about an earthquake that he thinks he experienced 2 minutes ago… but really it was only because he saw that 315 of his friends just posted the same thing.

And because of my later adoption of Twitter, my followers and the people I follow are confined to a close group of friends who are forced to adhere to a 140 character ‘status’ limit, which prevents them from overzealously embellishing on Valentine’s Day or the Knicks or about how awesome they are. And also, my close friends aren’t like that.

For this reason, I will shortly be saying goodbye to Facebook and maintaining my social media presence solely via Twitter.

I’m off my soapbox now.  My apologies for offending the Facebook enthusiasts.


Sorry, I'm not sorry.

3 comments:

  1. I feel like twitter is the exact same thing minus with two very important differences. Of course the 140 character limit, and your family most likely doesn't follow you on twitter. There is the same amount of self promotion on twitter, only you get to see your favorite jackass celeb talk too.

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