OMFG... you actually are expected to pay money to facebookfor credits for games. Getting virtual items, for virtual characters. Paying a game to waste your mind and your life... This is one of those 'what is the world coming to?' moments for me.

Facebook Zombie

I have finally joined the ranks of the facebook undead. I am building my war chest of friends, weapons to bolster my confidence when in need. It is a good way of keeping in touch with people. It’s an even better way of finding people you don’t talk to anymore and trying to figure out if your life is turning our better than theirs. Another treat for ones confidence. We facebookers, as I proudly label myself, are like zombies. A website cannot confer emotional connection, it cannot reach out and touch you no matter how evocative the wording or thumbnail is. There is something so unreal about the facebook friend connection.

One of the best things about facebook is the revival of high school cool. You can find so many different ways to rank and label a person, and let’s not belie the importance of the profile picture. I have been on only for a few days and have already changed mine several times. It’s important to get just the right picture to sum yourself up to an audience you barely know or have a connection with. If the profile picture is good enough, it can multi- task. It will help you to build new interesting friends that look better on html than they do in real life. It can help to reach out and slap people you went to high school with but haven’t seen in a long while, (or thought about for that matter), with your beauty and therein supposedly smashing life. Of course how good facebook pictures look exactly equates the value of your life and lifestyle. Lol

This is not to say that I do not like facebook. It has been enjoyable although a bit akward, making new ‘friends’ each day and using that as a means of measuring my self worth, in some vague fashion.

Something I really don’t like is the hour I just spent looking up people that I haven’t thought of in many years. I found one, looked at her friend list and suddenly remembered people that I haven’t spoken to or thought of for more than a decade. Looking at old boyfriends, people I disliked, old friends – all these long lost feelings came to me. Somehow I think that is perhaps the biggest problem with facebook. There is a reason these people are not in my life anymore and I don’t think about them. Even a far reaching analytical mind has trouble seeing the relevance in looking up a boyfriend who was previously unremembered and reapplying an emotion to a picture on a screen. We already have so much to digest. Flashing lights and chance encounters. Vital energy need not be spent hashing up the less important parts of ones past.

Facebook spends human energy like a rich sheik. It is amazing how many things one can do in the name of wasting time on the site. Judging and quantifying small tidbits from everyone elses online life. Online life… scary maybe? A random wall post from Janine. A news tidbit telling you what Bob7 is doing. Updates from bob 1-5….

It’s not just a confidence builder, however intangible and questionable that confidence may be, it is also a place where one can be rejected. I added so many people that I still like but have in truth forgotten. There are 2 that haven’t ignored or confirmed my friend request yet. I will check semi compulsively waiting in a quiet spot in the back of my mind for them to accept. Naturally, if they do not I will simply wonder what is wrong with me and why they don’t like me. An entire emotional scale that I would otherwise not be subject too. Fantastic facebook.

And how would one go about deleting a friend? Suppose they become offended and hurt and begin to slander you, unbeknownst to you, on other people’s walls. It is a virtual high school cafeteria for grownups. This is why I avoided it for so long.

But I have to admit, it is one of the most distracting websites I have seen. My brain is wired the way every other humans is, therein I am attracted to the cacophony of phony friends. I would love to be enlightened otherwise, but knowing better isn’t the same as doing better. I do want to keep in touch with a handful of the people I am acquiring in the chest.

I’m not too sure that a good quantity of workplace office type setting could survive without facebook. I am willing to bet a large amount that workplaces with IT blocked facebook sites sport more unhappy employees and have higher turn around rates. Only the very dedicated actually work all 40 hours of the week. Facebook is a major workplace respite, though its effect on productivity likely devastating.

I think because I am new to the site I am going through the sick fascination of looking at people I don’t like. It makes me cringe but I do get to judge them, all superior from beyond the screen.

Will anything come of this?