Facebook Off

I joined facebook several months ago because of two friends who repeatedly told me I should join facebook. Since I joined (or maybe because I joined) those two friends are rarely on it, and to be honest I don’t blame them. I arrived very late at the facebook party, and I didn’t bring a bottle, or a date. And now I’m here I just stand in the corner giving everyone dirty looks and occasionally shouting obscenities.

The problem is facebook annoys me, and although I’ve tried to get into it and participate, I have very little interest in the lives of people that I barely know, or that I knew almost 30 years ago (and by “knew” I mean we went to the same school but were never actually friends), and I find it strange that they would have any interest in mine. This is why I resisted joining for so long. One glance at my short list of “friends” will tell you that I’m not a very good advocate for social networking. Don’t get me wrong, I do actually have friends in real life; people that I’m happy to spend time with, and that I do have an interest in, not many admittedly, and out of that small number of friends there’s an even smaller group of people that I class as close friends, friends that I will always be extremely loyal to, and will do almost anything for (even join facebook). Anyway, I digress, I'll get back to the point.

So facebook annoys me. The trouble is I keep falling foul of some of my pet peeves, and I have many. I warn you now, there’s a very big chance this will get ranty...

The very first thing I noticed on joining up was the habit people have on facebook of referring to themselves in the third person:

Glenn just got up.

Glenn feels sad.

Glenn is going to bed.

Glenn is a bit freaked out by all this fucking illeism. If you were having a real life conversation with someone and they started talking in the third person you’d assume they were completely mental, you’d finish the conversation as soon as you possibly can, and make a mental note to avoid any further conversation with them again. It takes all the willpower you can muster just to refrain from bopping illeists over the head with a very large blunt instrument until they can no longer remember who they are.

Another thing is how mundane most status updates tend to be, millions of people declaring that they’re doing an everyday humdrum activity; they’re getting up, they’re having breakfast, they’re going out, they’ve come back home, they’re having dinner, they’re going to bed, blah blah blah. Is this really what people on facebook are interested in? But the mundane ones are a blessing compared to the “Please give me sympathy and attention” status updates, they seem to be the mainstay of facebook. They’ll often involve an illness or injury of some kind (normally upgraded to be worse than they actually are):

Glenn has got flu!!!!!!!!

Ah, what you’ve got there my “friend” is a fucking cold. But of course nobody has colds now, the common cold has been killed off by the media, now if you’re going to have an illness it has to be one worth boasting about, it has to be flu, and even that’s not enough anymore, now we have to have bird flu, or pig flu, or in my own personal twitter based flu case, Japanese Fighting Fish flu; the toughest, most ferocious flu ever known to man, or Japanese Fighting Fish... I have actually had proper, full grown, authentic flu once or twice, and I’m pretty sure the last thought on my delirious and confused mind is ‘Ooh, I must stare at an oh so bright screen through my too painful to open eyes and tell everyone on facebook that I, heroically and bravely, have flu’. Oh and just a little extra tip; you really don’t need to use that many exclamation marks.

The above is just a mild example of thousands of different types of status updates designed to grab sympathy and attention. The worst are the ones that make a sweeping statement but with no actual details:

Glenn is on the way to hospital!!!!!!!!

It’s doubtful you’ll actually find out why. It’s unlikely that whilst being rushed to hospital in the back of a speeding ambulance, fighting for your life, you’re going to battle with the paramedic to take out your phone and inform a bunch of relative strangers of your plight, but not the reason behind it. The comments will be full of ‘what’s happened?’, ‘hope ur ok’, and ‘wots the matter hun’ but all you’ll get as an explanation for this particular announcement is ‘I don’t really want to go into it’. Really, you don’t? Maybe you shouldn’t have fucking posted it then. Of course these posts don’t have to involve a medical issue, it can be a friend or partner (normally referred to as “somebody”) who has upset the writer in some way, or just a general all encompassing ‘Glenn is pissed off’. They’re all designed to illicit the same kind of concerned ‘U ok hun, wots wrong’ response.

This brings me nicely to grammar. A lot of the posts I see on facebook are practically illegible, with a mixture of terrible spelling, complete lack of punctuation, ill formed nonsensical sentences, and that old bastion of illegibility, text speak. I know text speak came about in the days when mobile phones would limit the amount of characters you could send in a text, but facebook doesn’t have a character limit so what’s the point? Are you really saving yourself that much effort from one or two less keystrokes? Conversely, twitter does have a character limit but I almost never see text speak on there. Go figure! And speaking of spelling mistakes, ‘hon’ is short for ‘honey’ whereas ‘hun’ is either an army of fifth century Mongolian conquerors led by one Mr Attila, or a derogatory term for Germans during WWI, unless of course I missed something and everyone is actually accusing each other of being barbarous and destructive. Whatever the case ‘hun’ is one of the most overused words on facebook, along with my biggest pet hate of all... ‘lol’

The red mist is descending now so it’s possibly time I left this particular subject (for now) with a positive note about facebook... Er... It gave me something to blog about.