FaceSpace, MyFace, SpaceBook, Etc.

Facebook has become a part of my life. I don’t really like to admit it, but it’s true. I change my status update more frequently than I am proud of, especially considering I am 26 years old and therefore a grown-ass-woman that shouldn’t spend so much time on Facebook. Sometimes I feel like a Jonas-Brother-Loving, dinner-table-texting tweenager because I am so involved with this thing that is Facebook. But I mean really, what is Facebook? Why do I love it so much?

Facebook is essentially an acceptable outlet for our basic, narcissistic human nature. You reach a certain age where it becomes tacky and annoying to constantly talk about yourself, but on your Facebook page that’s totally acceptable. In fact it’s expected. Facebook feeds the ego so much, it encourages you to speak in the 3rd person through the status updates, and everybody knows that people who speak in the 3rd person are jerks. And I’m not going to lie. It feels nice to put up a status update that gets a lot of comments. It’s almost like setting little bear traps on my Facebook page, and after I post a particularly clever, catchy, or interesting update, I can’t help but check my traps...and be a little excited about it.

Since I’ve mentioned status updates, I would like to spend a little time discussing Facebook etiquette. I feel like there should be some basic, unspoken rules of conduct for status updates. Just like it is not polite to talk about certain things in front of people because it might make them uncomfortable, I don’t think you should post certain things on your status updates for the same reason. I’m not a fan of overly political or overly dramatic status updates. They make me uncomfortable. The overly political status updates aren’t as bad as the super-emotional ones, and I usually just roll my eyes at them, especially depending on the person. But it’s the melodramatic status updates that really bug me. The “I broke up with my boyfriend and insert I want to die song lyrics here.” Facebook status updates like this are just too much for me. It’s like when you ask the cashier at the drugstore “How are you?” to be nice and she answers you with a, “Well, I’ll be better when this custody battle is over. Can you believe my husband—I mean my ex-husband—told my kids that he would take them to Disney World? He can’t even afford to give them lunch money. Well I never. ..Debit or credit hon?”

It’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I’m being inhumane. I just wasn’t expecting that. It’s not a conversation I would have with anybody while standing in line at Walgreens, let alone with someone that I just met. It’s the same thing with Facebook status updates. Some things just don’t need to be shared with all 500 of your “friends.”

And that brings me to another thing that Facebook has provided for me: a countless number of awkward social situations. The worst of these is when I run into a Facebook “friend” that I have no intentions of being real life friends with. This happened recently at the grocery store. I was walking out of the store when a girl that I went to high school with was walking in, and suddenly I became very engrossed with an imaginary voice-mail on my phone. I had literally never spoken to this girl in high school, but knew who she was, and only through the courage that the internet gives you did we become “friends.” I was, for her, the exact same thing that she was for me: another friend to make her total friends a little more impressive. It’s shameful, I know.

So why even add her at all? Well, the only thing more uncomfortable than running into someone that you are Facebook “friends,” and Facebook “friends” only with, is running into someone that you have “denied.” I mean, think about what you are ultimately saying if someone musters up the courage to add you, and then you deny their friend request. What that says to the person is, “I dislike you so much in the real world, I don’t even want to be cyber friends with you.” It’s not a friendship that requires any type of nurturing. It’s the cactus of friendships. But you find this person so repulsive, so unpleasant, so repellant, that you don’t even want them to appear in your news feed, you don’t even want them to see the pictures that you took when you went to St. Augustine for the weekend, you don’t even want other people to see that you are friends. Ouch. Running into that person in the store could be even more awkward.

Usually after I have one of these uncomfortable experiences, I always go home declaring that I will erase my Facebook account, cut those ties once and for all. I think about how much more productive I would be in life if I didn’t have Facebook. I think about all the books I could read, all the lesson-planning I could do, all the life I could live. I scold myself for letting this horrible relationship go on for so long, remind myself that I’m a sensible, logical (albeit overly-dramatic) person. The only reason I’ve let this go on so long is because my human nature makes me meddlesome and prone to snooping, and Facebook allows me an inconspicuous way to do this. It allows me, and millions of others, to show off how obscure and eclectic our tastes are (Interests: the sounds of Bill Withers and Lady GaGa), how happy and carefree our lives are (or at least our pictures are). It allows us to scream “Look at me! Look at me!” without actually screaming “Look at me! Look at me!”

When I get home, I march straight to my computer ready to stop, cold-turkey. But in order to delete my Facebook account, I have to sign on to Facebook. And of course I have a friend request so I have to see who it is, to see the friend that will never be. And of course it’s that tall, dark, mysterious guy that sat next to me in Restoration and 18th Century Literature class my junior year in college that I had coffee with once. And of course I have to accept his request just so I can spy and see if he is still dating that really awful girl from my Post-Modern class that laughed like a seal and seemed to derive great pleasure from letting everyone see her nipples through her shirt (it’s 18 degrees outside…wear a bra). While I’m creeping on him, I see that he is friends with the hilarious guy from my biology lab and I just have to know if hilarious guy ended up opening that bar he was talking about...