Thursday, November 13, 2008

face off

**This is a post from last November that I found languishing in draft form. It still holds true, I think.

So I was poking around the internet looking for one of my old college roommates recently. Everyone does this, or "googling" would be a viable verb. But I found this roommate on Facebook, so I decided to get off my high horse and sign up, just to reconnect with her. Which I did. But then, quite quickly, people started coming out of the woodwork. I found my other two roomies from USC Class of '96, and then the high school friends found me, and the graduate school ones, and they told two friends, and so on; and well. I now have 29 friends on Facebook. Which isn't apparently a lot, but it is for someone who really just intended to find one old friend.

If you don't have a familiarity with how this works, first you identify someone, by name and photo, who is a "friend." Then you say they are your "friend." However, they have to confirm that you are, in fact a "friend" before you can actually see any of their information or otherwise interact with them. If they remember you, and they actually want to see what you are up to, then they confirm that you are a "friend." If not, they can choose to ignore your request. This, to me, is the pain and anguish that we went through back when we knew these people, wanting desperately to be accepted. It's a little too on point for me, if you get my drift. These are people I knew in high school and college, for cripes sake.

I find this Facebook world very odd. At it's core, it's a great idea. But very quickly it becomes, as my friend Jeff calls it, the "face-my-past-book." And then there are the statuses, which I don't necessarily need to know about. Do I really need to know if someone I really didn't like that much in high school is updating their Quickbooks?

Anyway, I've mostly shut it down in terms of "Alerts!" about who wants to "throw a snowball" at me, or give me a unicorn or some crap. Seriously a time suck, that Facebook.

1 comment:

Chris said...

Facebook. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.