Here is my final editorial from the Observer...
I believe that, as this is the final time I will be writing something for the Observer, I should probably use as many hackneyed and cliché idioms and colloquialisms as I can possibly muster in order to make this one of those quintessential senior goodbye type of reflections. Anything I can do to cue the waterworks, I guess…
Except this will not be one of those reflections.
As I sit and pensively ponder what sincere reflection I can offer the student body, I find myself with the common college distraction—facebook. Instead of discovering some serene inspiration from the social-networking productivity black hole, I find myself growing tired and angry at the amass of mindless fodder that fills my newsfeed, both top news and most recent.
Call me old fashioned, but I firmly believe there is an etiquette to existing—and living, if you will—in the digital world on a social networking site, facebook or the like. And, at the risk of sounding like my grandfather, there should be some conventional requirements as to social behaviour. Follow my logic: facebook is a social networking site, so your etiquette should be socially appropriate.
People’s actions on facebook have been a point of contention for me for some time. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious indie-kid, I’ve had a facebook account since my junior year of high school—and yes, that was back when facebook was limited to a network for college students. At that point, high school students could have a profile if a college student, with an already existing profile, invited them to the network.
As I have watched facebook grow and develop, the sleek and clean interactions between friends has become cluttered and convoluted by fan pages, applications and scourge that is Farmville. While I genuinely think the games on facebook have crawled from the depths of Satan’s asshole, they do successfully provide a way to idly consume one’s time. If people are really that desperate for something to do online and are unwilling to unplug, whatever.
I’m more okay with such useless behaviour because I can hide it from my feed; I do not have to concern myself with such banal trifles. However, in that vein, I do not want to participate in Farmville, Mafia Wars, Wizarding Academy, Dante’s Inferno, Friend of the Day, Petsville, My Aquarium, Honesty Box, nor do I want to know what my husband looks like, so please, for the sake of my sanity and all things holy, do not send me invitations for such things.
Not only do I not want invites to asinine applications, I equally do not want invites to fan pages about winning free iPads or other such nonsensical crap. Those type of gimmicks remind me of the terrible chain emails received once upon a time—SEND THIS TO TEN PEOPLE TO GET AN APPLEBEES GIFT CERTIFICATE. My problem is that I received emails like that when I created my first email account, back when the internet was only ran at a dial-up speed. You know, when I was in grade school and my email address was TMNT4ever@aol.com.
And what’s worse is they’ve just recently changed the “page” format. No longer are you a “fan” of pages, you simply “like” them, which confuses the process entirely. At first, I was chagrined to see friends being a fan of “In Kindergarten, girls had Cooties. Now, they have STDs”, not only because the sentence popping up on my news feed was structurally unsound, but because these pages are some of the most ignorant fodder I’ve seen since I stopped watching MTV.
Pages, according to facebook’s terms of use, are “special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor.” I’m pretty sure there’s not a charitable, nor political, organization concerned with renaming cooties STDs. I’m pretty sure there’s not a business trying to promote “The Gaga Law,” no matter how many gaga, ro-mamas you think equal a bad romance. I have a couple friends that have almost 1250 pages they “like”.
Call me a purest for wanting a clean and tidy social networking site; call me a party-pooper because I’m unwilling to have fun with “pages” because it is against the terms of use; call me whatever you’d like. However, if you’re someone who likes the page “WAIT!..OMG!...WHERE IS MY PHONE I THINK I LOST IT!!....oh wait here it is”, I’m going to call you a waste of digital space.
While I have, in fact, had those moments when I thought I lost my phone for a split second, I do not need to commiserate with others on facebook about it. It has become a space on facebook where people can troll and compete to comment first. It just needs to stop. Then, what’s worse is the new trend of pages that you must like in order to see the content. Really, people?! Again, reflecting upon my first email account—SEND THIS TO TEN PEOPLE AND THE PHOTO WILL POP UP ON YOUR EMAIL. I got that one, too.
If your curiosity is so insatiable that you must know “The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School”, and you find your cursor hovering dangerously close to the “Like” icon, stop. Just stop and step away from your computer. Carefully take your finger, lick it thrice, then place it in your ear and swirl it around. Then, every time you consider “liking” something of that nature, think about how embarrassing it was to give yourself a wet-willy.
Seriously, I found myself curious about this dress just the other day. However, rather than subjecting myself to such juvenile undertaking, I simply remembered that on the internet, there are these magical things that let you search for whatever you want—they’re called search engines. So I hopped on over to my engine of choice, Blackle.com, and I typed in “the prom dress that got this girl suspended from school” and TA DA! I found an article from CNN about a girl who was suspended because of the prom dress she wore. What a brave new world, indeed.
So please, next time you find yourself drowning hours of your life into facebook, remember that you are no longer seven, and acting like a seven year old is not okay. Practice good etiquette when participating in social networking, I beg of you.
That is my parting wish for the student body, as I approach graduation. I don’t want to seem like a jerk because I’m de-friending people after I graduate, but I just cannot handle some people’s lack of tact on facebook. I have left the paper in the hands of capable people, who don’t participate in such tomfoolery online.
Esto Dignus.