WOODY'S SOCIAL MEDIA RANT PART I
THE FACEBOOK CONUNDRUM
THE FACEBOOK CONUNDRUM
Much like viewing the Twilight movies, I fought against ever creating a Facebook account. I already had a small handful of people I would email my thoughts, ideas, and occasional funny Photoshoppy Goodness to...so I didn't see a point to this whole Facebook fad. I say fad because let's face it...it was the MySpace of the new millennium. (except without all the sparkly animated gifs which was virtually all I ever saw on there)
After my best friend busted my balls for about a year, I finally relented and made an account. The reason for this was simple. There were two friends I had lost touch with from High School, and it seemed like perhaps I could rekindle those friendships. Right off the bat, the first of those friends was willing to admit on a public forum that he both knew me AND was a friend on top of that. My heart swelled with pride as I took my first baby steps into this new (to me) world. My friend left me a quick hey-how-are-ya email and I anxiously replied figuring this would spark a never ending flood of memories and laughter...
....annnnd then he never replied again.
That of course is when I realize that its been oh I don't know....twenty fucking years? ...and this guy could give a shit if I just had my dick amputated in a tragic escalator accident. From there I started accumulating a meager following of friends so I set about to attempt to use the social outlet for it's intended purpose : to put out warm, witty, sometimes self-deprecating messages, endearing you to your newly rediscovered friends whom you've lost touch with! Sure I struck out with my first friend reconnection...but I have all these new friends who are waiting to draw me to their bosom and accept me for the warm human being that I am! Right?? RIGHT?!?!?!? *sigh* (scratches head)
Having the illusion of a male-bonding experience shattered, I then started looking around and noticed that Facebook is like an ant colony. You have worker ants, soldier ants, and food gathering ants. Everyone seemed to fall into one category or the other.
For instance, there's....
THE NON-ENTITIES.
These are FB users who have accounts, and occasionally "like" something...but generally speaking...hardly ever go onto their account and for the life of me I have no idea why they are cluttering up the internet with their presence.
I guess to counterpoint those people are the users that actually want to be on Facebook....but must be logging on at the local Burger King's free wi-fi hot spot because these are the people who have to have it THEIR WAY.
THE COMPLAINERS
They come. They bitch. They leave......and then they log in again an hour later to complain some more. These are the people who complain at every turn when any changes are made to the free website that lets them play games and post pictures and video."OMG, Facebook is at it again! They are stealing our personal email addresses and selling them to advertising companies!!!! WE MUST STOP THIS!!!!"
Look, Facebook is a free website. You don't see Classmates.com let you connect to your old high school chums without dropping some coin, yet these people still act like they are the shareholders and have rights to demand things. They all seem to know how best Facebook should be run. I suspect these are the same people in my office who complain about whomever is running the country and how fixing the world's problems is so easy....if only they were in charge.
From there you have the people who friend you for purposes unknown. We'll call these types :
THE COLLECTORS
These are the people who hoard friends on Facebook for no other reason than because they know you from somewhere. Maybe you are a classmate from High School...or maybe you shared an elevator once. ::shrugs:: These FB'ers are confusing to me, because once you have friended them, your usefulness is at an end. If you post on their wall, they will ignore you.It's almost as if they are assimilating you like the old Star Trek villains that would consume all life and subjugate it to their will. You have been added to the Collective and therefore you have no further value.
When I am not being ignored by one of these sects of the Facebook Cult, I like to play around on another group's pages. We'll call these people :
THE ZOMBIES
So named because they post the most mindless comments and somehow get 50 comments in response. An example of such would be the people who live anywhere south of Pennsylvania who occasionally see more than six snowflakes fall in a 24 hour period and feel compelled to post the absolute mind numbing comment "It's snowing!!!!!" (complete with extra unnecessary punctuation and perhaps a smiley face) It seems that the only way to run a successful page is to post things using five or fewer words.
The Zombie, I have learned, can be your biggest ally or your absolute Facebook ruin. On the one hand you have their inane comments which serve to bolster your message thread count, thus giving you the all-important ego boost by making it seem like people give a shit and care about what you say. On the other hand, do you really need one more "DISLIKE!" comment after you post a humorous well-thought out comment bitching about people who turn off their high beams three feet before passing you on the road. I mean you post something you hope is side-splittingly funny and then give it a good four or five hours for the masses to digest your wit and have time enough to offer up props to the comedy God that you are.....and then you log in and find that there hasn't been a single comment.
But that's probably because the Zombies on my Facebook friends list are also a part of another Facebook Phenomenon :
THE GAMER
Gamers are the not-so-rare breed who think nothing of filling your inbox with requests for hammers, hay, and assorted sundries. I mean do these people even check to see if I am even PLAYING any of these games? Gamers are usually identified by the fact that they have 2,000 friends on their friends list and never post anything non-game related. Warning : They may have a problem discerning fantasy from reality (hint : your farm is the fantasy).
And finally there is one last notable crowd :
THE QUOTERS
Quoters are the subset of Facebook who post famous quotes, and song lyrics presumably because they either have nothing of substance to say or they are trying to sound lofty and intelligent by quoting a John Lennon lyric or a portion of a Shakespeare sonnet.
I am relatively sure that the Song Lyric Quoters drop these comments as "Zombie bait".
IE : chum used to stir up the Zombie posters on the person's friends list and whip them into a posting frenzy, which in turn makes you look like the most popular person on Facebook.
The Shakespearean quoters on the other hand, try to make you think and usually fail miserably at it.
That is when I realized that my entire FB existence was going to be based around being ignored by the only people I truly deemed worthy (those that I haven't heard from or have no way of contacting outside of FB) or based on mind-numbing commentary "makin' brownies!". That is when I decided I would use my Facebook page to be everything that all the other pages weren't. A dumping ground for all the odd thoughts that run through my head. Everyone has them. You are watching a tv show, a movie, or idiots at the mall, and then a comment comes to mind that makes you giggle or think "gee it's odd that people with machine guns can't figure out how the hell to hit a target when they have 150 bullets spraying out of that gun".
Is that what Facebook was intended for? Fuck I don't know. All I know is that trying to find validation on Facebook is like to trying to find a plot in a Paris Hilton movie.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to finish compiling my Top 5 Reasons Why Performing Oral Sex On A Cadaver is Better Than A Live Woman while watching my "Friend Count" drop like an H-Bomb out of the Enola Gay.
