#3-1 (two thousand and mine)
I don’t have many friends on Facebook, comparatively speaking. If I had to guess, which is all that it would be, a guess: I have the least amount of friends out of all the friends that I have. It isn’t like I’ve looked at all fifty of their profiles to see. Still, each one of the ones that I remember having looked at, as far as I remember, they have more, many of whom I’ve known quite well in real life, none of whose lives are so interesting as to have more than fifty people tuned into their day-to-day existence, reading about what they had for dinner that night, how much they would rather still be in bed than at work, their migraine or whatever for them actually defines “a migraine”, going to a movie, going to get drunk.
I have the least amount of friends out of all the friends that I have; the repeat of the phrase doesn’t sound right echoing through my mind, less of a statement than perhaps some kind of riddle, not quite a Zen koan, a thing trying to communicate in the spaces between the words themselves but not visible enough to be seen, not loud enough to be heard.
The people who are their friends who number more than my own seem even less dimensional, faces one temporarily sees in a crowd but it’s strange to make eye contact with them. If I were to read their profiles, but you cannot ever see them because either Facebook either defaults to these kinds of privacy settings or everyone has just become so paranoid about the perceived value of their own very basic information that they’ve all set it to where just “friends” can see, it’s been too long since I first got on the site that I can’t remember, perhaps I would know more about them than to make basic assumptions: women my age with two last names who probably were a lot more attractive ten years ago. Men who probably never were, failing to group words together in a way that makes them appear anything more than mono-toned narrators of their various moods, like most of us are.
But I will never know, which lends itself to my principal argument about Facebook: either the way the site has set itself up, or due to the spirit of its users, there doesn’t seem to be any way to just meet someone on Facebook, to find common interests and perhaps meet in real life, not like other sites that have came to the fore and have eclipsed over the last several years. Going further into this point, even though it’s certainly possible to communicate with others, the methodology a user would have to employ in order to do so feels awkward, almost old-fashioned, moreso than the way the old BBSs used to be set up. You don’t necessarily talk to just one person, you’re talking to everyone else that person knows, shouting in a crowd of people who are already shouting.
The life of Facebook lacks any sense of serendipity or kismet, lacking any grand coincidences, no sense of adventure that makes you feel that you are more than just the basic sum of your interests, schools, and fan pages, the initial flush of fun and “newness” gradually being replaced by a sense that you are nothing more than just one profile of millions, one little node in a expansive tableau of too many other nodes, each bit as isolated as the one you belong to. And within it, more often that not, the only person to talk to, is yourself.
I’ve been in front of a computer too long to believe that Facebook will last; eventually the status updates will even begin to bore the people writing about them, each survey posted will be too similar to many others that were taken before, and it will clear out much in the way that MySpace, before it, has done. Visiting MySpace is strangely like going to the indoor shopping mall out in the suburbs that was really happening back when you were young, but hardly anyone goes there now and the storefronts are mostly empty. There’s a ghost town feeling to it all, clicking through one abandoned profile after another, which is almost certainly where Facebook will be in five years. And at the speed of how these things seem to rise and fall, five years is probably giving it a more generous sentence than what it deserves, as sites with more to work with and ultimately more to do therein have lifecycles that have lasted less.
Still, I’ll be on Facebook for a while longer: it’s nice to be able to see what my fiancée is up to while I’m at work (recently she bought a ukelele and ate an ice cream cone the size of her head), and there are a few people on the site that I parlay and have a good time with, so feel free to add me if you want.
And we'll talk, if not directly to one another.
I have the least amount of friends out of all the friends that I have; the repeat of the phrase doesn’t sound right echoing through my mind, less of a statement than perhaps some kind of riddle, not quite a Zen koan, a thing trying to communicate in the spaces between the words themselves but not visible enough to be seen, not loud enough to be heard.
The people who are their friends who number more than my own seem even less dimensional, faces one temporarily sees in a crowd but it’s strange to make eye contact with them. If I were to read their profiles, but you cannot ever see them because either Facebook either defaults to these kinds of privacy settings or everyone has just become so paranoid about the perceived value of their own very basic information that they’ve all set it to where just “friends” can see, it’s been too long since I first got on the site that I can’t remember, perhaps I would know more about them than to make basic assumptions: women my age with two last names who probably were a lot more attractive ten years ago. Men who probably never were, failing to group words together in a way that makes them appear anything more than mono-toned narrators of their various moods, like most of us are.
But I will never know, which lends itself to my principal argument about Facebook: either the way the site has set itself up, or due to the spirit of its users, there doesn’t seem to be any way to just meet someone on Facebook, to find common interests and perhaps meet in real life, not like other sites that have came to the fore and have eclipsed over the last several years. Going further into this point, even though it’s certainly possible to communicate with others, the methodology a user would have to employ in order to do so feels awkward, almost old-fashioned, moreso than the way the old BBSs used to be set up. You don’t necessarily talk to just one person, you’re talking to everyone else that person knows, shouting in a crowd of people who are already shouting.
The life of Facebook lacks any sense of serendipity or kismet, lacking any grand coincidences, no sense of adventure that makes you feel that you are more than just the basic sum of your interests, schools, and fan pages, the initial flush of fun and “newness” gradually being replaced by a sense that you are nothing more than just one profile of millions, one little node in a expansive tableau of too many other nodes, each bit as isolated as the one you belong to. And within it, more often that not, the only person to talk to, is yourself.
I’ve been in front of a computer too long to believe that Facebook will last; eventually the status updates will even begin to bore the people writing about them, each survey posted will be too similar to many others that were taken before, and it will clear out much in the way that MySpace, before it, has done. Visiting MySpace is strangely like going to the indoor shopping mall out in the suburbs that was really happening back when you were young, but hardly anyone goes there now and the storefronts are mostly empty. There’s a ghost town feeling to it all, clicking through one abandoned profile after another, which is almost certainly where Facebook will be in five years. And at the speed of how these things seem to rise and fall, five years is probably giving it a more generous sentence than what it deserves, as sites with more to work with and ultimately more to do therein have lifecycles that have lasted less.
Still, I’ll be on Facebook for a while longer: it’s nice to be able to see what my fiancée is up to while I’m at work (recently she bought a ukelele and ate an ice cream cone the size of her head), and there are a few people on the site that I parlay and have a good time with, so feel free to add me if you want.
And we'll talk, if not directly to one another.