I guess I won’t be cross posting this on my blog for Social Media Marketing class.
Again, fair warning that there’s a decent amount of hypocrisy thrown in here. Then again, I guess I can just say my wisdom on the topic comes partly from experience. Problem solved.
Second disclaimer: I love Twitter. I’m a sucker for having a place to vent about things and convince myself that 150 mostly-strangers are listening and caring. It works for me.
Facebook on the other hand… NO. Stop it, Facebook. You are exploiting everyone’s insecurities while simultaneously worsening them. You are the evil genius that will destroy everyone.
True story: I was a Facebook addict like everyone else. I spent hours a day checking and re-checking and staring at the postings of 500-some “friends” trickling through my news feed. Joining as a high school senior meant keeping in touch with everyone I hated in high school and networking with more new jerks in college. Lovely! And so I wasted the hours doing typical Facebook “creeping,” checking up on people I rarely actually had contact with. Even more effort was put in to glamorizing my own relatively sparse social life to fashion my profile into that of an active social butterfly. In real life, I hate everyone. Or, as my mother more elegantly phrases it, I am “very selective about who I choose to spend time with.”
The summer before my senior year at Bradley began, I had a small epiphany about my life and decided there were much more productive ways to spend my Facebook hours each day. And so my account was deactivated. And I was free.
When fall rolled around, I began a Communications course that, among other things, discussed the commonality of my Facebook behaviors and feelings. For the first time in college I actually read both books we were supposed to read in that class in their entirety. One in particular reinforced and deepened my hate for Facebook, citing examples from countless interviews from students my own age and younger about the stress of trying to maintain a polished Facebook image but never realizing that every other person puts just as much effort into doing the same.
I’ve met countless people who will say, “yeah, I don’t really use/care about Facebook.” False. A half-completed Facebook profile is like walking on the street without pants on. The world thinks there is something wrong with you for not following the crowd.
A Facebook profile that shows little or no sign of interaction with others is equally, if not more, off-putting. The book describes it and I did it too: however many hours a day you spend texting or Facebook chatting or face-to-face conversing with your best friend is not enough if the world doesn’t witness it. Instead, we make our private conversations public to put on a show and to convince others that we’re not big fat losers; that there is more to us than what we have to say in our own status updates; that we are valid because we are social.
This leads me to what I finally concluded was my biggest caveat with Facebook: the world looks down on you for not participating, but the reality is that Facebook is based on the assumption that everyone wants to be social. Because of Facebook, everyone thinks it’s proper to place social contact above all else: above privacy, freedom, and independence. The unofficial Facebook user anthem:
“People see what I say and do and where I go, so I am a valid, important person. If people don’t see you doing things and going places and talking to people, are you still alive?” (if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?)
