Friday, June 13, 2008

Facebook Farce

I'm on Facebook but I'm still not 100% convinced that it's a good thing. People have been able to track me down despite my use of a pseudonym of sorts. I guess they've seen the people I've added as friends and put two and two together. Why should I be so worried? I have a blog that is available for all the world to see right? Well, no one would know about my blog unless I told them about it. My surname is not on it anywhere and no one would really go looking to see if I had one but on Facebook people deliberatley seek you out. People I may have wanted to forget about (even though that has not yet happened) and I have been surprised by the people I had forgotten about who have made contact with me.

The thing about Facebook, aside from the fact that my very good school friend adds all kinds of nasty messages (which I love by the way) is that it is sooo time consuming and difficult. To do anything you are required to add three million applications and send it to every one of your friends before you even get to say "hello" to them. I don't care if they send me a diamond ring or feed my pet or add fish to my aquarium. For these reasons alone I rarely look at it. When I do however I'm surprised at how much activity has been unleashed since I last logged in. Do these people sit on Facebook all day everyday? Are they there just waiting for someone to throw a mudpie at them? Do they hang out everyday to see who sent them a bottle of vodka at happy hour? Are they so desperate for companionship that they see nothing wrong with throwing gross images of bums with exposed haemorroids at each other? Whatever happened to doing that in real life with a close circle of friends that you actually spent time with face to face?

I can see the advantages of Facebook. For example my brother was able to arrange his twenty year school reunion through it. He tracked down all manner of people who all met in our home town over the long weekend to drink as much booze as they could guzzle at the World's Greatest Pub Crawl. Having gone to my 20 year school reunion just a couple of years ago I can see why it was worth it. Mine was a hoot, even though I hung out that night with the same people I hung out with 20 years ago and promptly ignored the rest, just like I did in school. I would like to think I had grown somewhat since that time but apparently I haven't. Let's face it, they were boring then and were still boring at the school reuinion. Some people just don't change. Maybe that's my fear with Facebook. The boring people will contact me and they will still be boring and that, combined with the hard work that is Facebook, will finally see me deleting my profile and searching for something easier.

2 comments:

Meegan @ The Harvey Circus said...

Oh Michelle, I too have a silly Facebook account and can't really see the point in it, other than finding long lost family/friends or for a reunion (which I declined, from a Facebook invitation that an old school friend is attempting to arrange - a 10 year reunion, 2 years late... dumb? Yes!).

I blog. I don't see the need in me Facebooking as well.

My whole life is on our humble blog and if you really wanted to find me, all you'd need to do is google my name. I'm pretty sure Marc and I both come up somewhere on the front page of results in Google.

Plus, I'm boring. Well I think so anyway! I'm not going to add photos that are already loaded on the blog, or send people stuff (I don't even know how to do it) or change my status every 5 seconds - that's not going to help me get chores done or think up better and more ways to annoy a toddler :)

Although, I would like to have a game of scrabble online...

Churlita said...

I have a Myspace to keep an eye on my daughters'. It's all kind of ridiculous, but I have reconnected with a lot of people, so it's been good too.