I’m a facebook OG. I was too stupid and too poor to go to an Ivy League school, so while I wasn’t part of the first wave of facebook users, I got in pretty early. My college received access to facebook back in the spring of 2005, so I’ve been able to watch the social networking site mutate and evolve over the past several years. To give you some context of how much change I’ve witnessed, when I first signed up, it was still THE motherfucking facebook.com, before “the” was dropped for being insufficiently clean. Like I said, I’m an old-timer. Back in early days, facebook was about reconnecting with high school friends who went to different schools and making plans with your college friends. Unlike Myspace, it didn’t have myriad add-ons and design options that resulted in pages that looked like exploded digital diarrhea. Everyone’s profile looked the same; the site’s uniform, egalitarian design was geared to the utilitarian purpose of connecting with your friends. Put simply, it was a true social networking site.
Then came the feed.
As hard as it may be to believe now, the news feed function was met with great controversy upon its introduction. No one seemed to give two shits that the NSA was illegally wire-tapping phones, but the publication of one’s facebook activity on a centralized homepage (which was only visible to one’s facebook friends) had everyone abuzz with talk of Big Brother. Groups (remember facebook groups?) were started in protest of the new feature. Hundreds threatened to abandon facebook altogether. Over time, however, users came to embrace the feed, and Lord Zuckerberg’s genius was once again validated.
This is all preamble to my larger point, which is that the facebook newsfeed is the worst thing to have ever happened to digital culture, and in the top 10 worst things to have happened to humanity*.
Once the feed became accepted, facebook ceased to be a social networking site. Its primary function was no longer to connect with your friends and family. Instead, facebook became a hype machine for each individual user, an assembly line for the creation of ego monsters. Suddenly, no event could go unremarked upon, no matter how trivial or personal. Getting married? Starting two years before the date, post daily statuses counting down to the wedding. Just had a baby? Flood facebook with so many pictures that you could print them out and make a flipbook called “Baby’s First Circumcision”. Think it’s hot outside, or that Mondays are real bummers? Please, please thrust these inane thoughts onto the facebook nation. In an almost prophetic way, “the feed” was the perfect name for this feature, because it acts as constant sustenance for everyone’s raging egomania.
Nowhere is this rampant attention-seeking behavior more manifest than in the topic of this blog post. If you’ve been on facebook for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen a status update that looks something like this:
“Thinking about deactivating my facebook account…”
A status like this is usually followed by a chorus of people imploring the person to remain on facebook, which is, naturally, exactly what the author was gunning for. What bothers me the most about statuses such as these is how cravenly and shamelessly attention-whoring they are. The author is not, nor have they at any time, considering leaving facebook. Their need for love and validation is far too strong to leave a venue for megalomania the size of facebook. They are also, of course, not expecting anyone to pipe up and encourage them to leave facebook. As final proof of their intentions, note that, in my experience, NO ONE who has ever written a status like this subsequently deleted their account.
Is this generation really so pathetic, so sad, that we must directly beg our supposed friends to profess how much they love us? Is it no longer enough to look at our friend count (which contains more people than our grandparents probably knew in their whole lives) and our notifications (full of wall posts, messages, and likes)? These displays are so pitiful that it makes me contemplate if I should leave social networking behind altogether. I’m truly considering it.
Unless you don’t want me to.
* This may be inaccurate; I'm still putting a list together
No comments:
Post a Comment