Facebook

I've finally worked up the courage to take on Facebook. Where should I begin?

Facebook is to people as Wikipedia is to knowledge. You can learn a lot about a topic by looking it up on wikipedia, or you can learn a lot about people by looking them up on facebook. In fact, if you look up a person on wikipedia :: Akira Kurosawa you get just about the same amount of information as if you look up a person on facebook :: Kyle Oakeson. I suppose you get different information by looking a person up on facebook as opposed to wikipedia, but you can learn quite a bit about a person from what you read, and on both sites you are reading about them. It is a powerful tool, one that I would say benefits the living more than the dead, because it is capable of always changing whereas information in an encyclopedia is meant to be general enough that it doesn't change too frequently.

I think there are different aspects of facebook that I should address here: the culture of facebook in particular I think is key to understanding it. --I HATE the culture of facebook. When I was younger and social networking was new, and I had a myspace account instead of a facebook account, I think the culture appealed to me. You could meet friends online, check them out to determine if they would be cool in person, and then you could meet in person. When facebook came along the complexity of social networking enhanced because of the privacy. --Myspace had it's own culture that prevented it from being 'private'. And just about hte time when the myspace servers were getting overcrowded, I switched over to the baby giant FB. I didn't realize the potential of it (the founders probably didnt' either) until I got older, I thought it was just another myspace with better servers.
When I used it for a couple months I realized that it was a more posh version of myspace that allowed me to have some privacy by simply refusing to add people and blocking certain information from them. That meant that all of those annoying creepers that kept visiting my page to pull up dirt on me could be prevented from reading what I was writing. --I started blogging in my myspace days--real blogging, not the blogging I do on here or my other sites, but an actual weekly record of my life and the interpretation of it. I stopped when I realized people were actually reading it and I started writing in ms notepad (why I didn't use ms word I do not know, probably because I like the typewriter font).
In any case, as facebook began to grow and more and more people got online I still used it somewhat to meet new people, or at least to make penpals, but I reserved facebook more for my own gleaming of information and to give people a simple bio of myself. I suppose when I was 16 I was starving for attention just like everybody else, but I was too lazy to explain the complexities of my life so it was almost easier to not say them and let them look them up on facebook (I figured they would anyway). Having the ability to block certain people from reading about me was really just a gatekey to let me know who was loooking and who wasn't.
--I still didn't fully understand facebook though, and maybe that is because it hadn't evolved into the being that it is now, or maybe I was just too caught up in the culture of it.
I mean, c'mon, who wouldn't LOVE to have an online slideshow/storybook of their life with fun captions and photos. It was basically the digital version of those slideshow reels that people make after vacations...but just like those slideshow reels that people make after vacations, facebook became the dull boring cartoon man that refuses to let you leave his home until he shows you everything about his last family reunion. You know the one I'm referring to...the one where the other cartoon characters pretend to listen in boredom as they watch picture after picture of the same thing.--What I am getting at is that not everyone likes to look at those things.

Still, I maintained an active presence on facebook up until I left for my mission and was very much involved in the culture of it and keeping up with my friends the jones and trying to top some of their gags or lines or awesome photos. When I got back from my mission everything was different on facebook. Not just with the site itself but with my friends who were still on there and with facebook using society in general. The culture had changed society. More and more people were trying to keep up with the jones' in a facebook sense. More young kids were bragging about how awesome they are and had photos to prove it--literally people buy things just to post pictures of them using them on facebook, or they go on vacations just to show their friends that they go on vacations and have somethign to talk about. More and more people became obsessed with fitting into the culture of facebook rather than the real world.
In the real world, people don't repeat funny quotes or take pictures of mundane things.--or at least, they didn't. But somehow the facebook culture shaped society to feel as though they needed to do these stupid things in order to be 'included'. (to fulfill their needs for inclusion).
I think David Fincher got a lot of things correct when he directed his film. Infamously, Zuckerberg is portrayed in that film as the kid who was so desperate to have friends and although he did something outstanding, he still had no friends in real life. --I think that's a representation of the fb culture and not so much zuckerberg in real life (at least zuckerberg himself claims otherwise).
The point is that there is a distinct culture of facebook and that culture has shaped American society over the last 5-10 years.
If I were to describe that culture, I would probably use the following words and terms: fake, on the surface, desire to fit in, share, opinions, boredom, excessive, unnecessary, not real, irrelevant, pointless, wasteful, obsessive. . . I could go on forever.

Another point I would like to make as I attempt to explain away facebook is that it is just a more posh version of a forum or chat room. People used to (and still do) go to chat rooms to talk to people about their lives without having to do it in person. Forums too accomplished the same purpose. In fact, I used to go to forums and chat rooms all the time to B.s. with people who I didn't know and didn't care to know. All that facebook has done is add more personalization, more openness, and combined different internet tools into one location.
That leads to the second BIG point I want to make. Facebook is all about money anymore. In the beginning, Zuckerberg didn't want to use facebook to make money, but as it slowly grew and got bought out, it became an advertising center. Facebook is now the ultra place for Targeted Ads. If you ever thought it was annoying to see pillow pets while watching saturday morning cartoons and thought how irrelevant those ads are to you, you're going to LVE facebook because unless you write something about pillow pets or view a picture of a pillow pet, you don't get ads for it. What you do get are ads for things that you have expressed some sort of interest in. So you know those "kinky ru girls" ads you keep getting? It's because you looked at some picture of a russian girl and you fit a certain criteria that would look at porn or be lonely and wish you had a mail order russian bride. Try making a comment about how you wish you had a mail order russian bride and facebook will update itself to show you 5 different ads related to russian brides.
If you mention how you're on a diet but can't stop going to mcdonalds, who comes up? Mcdonalds. Why? because you used their name.

I'm not saying targeted ads are bad, I'm saying that from now until the future everything facebook designs and does will be related to making them more money by having you click on ads. The social aspect of it is a front to get you to use their system. If you use their system, you give them information which they in turn essentially "sell" to companies. It's a round about way, so it's not like they are GIVING the information away, they're selling the chance to target htat information. Plus, it's free information...facebook is owned by ...facebook. and everything you write on facebook can be used by facebook.
I have mixed feelings about that because I do appreciate learning about new products that might interest me, but I don't like to be flooded with ads when I'm trying to concentrate.

Not to mention that employers and other important people use facebook to gather information about you. Written all over business magazines and recruiting magazines are articles on how to make your facebook page (or any page that morphed from it, such as linkln or twitter) look professional. Do I want employers to know EVERYTHING about me? No. It's not that I have anyhting to hide, it's that people look at my life and try to analyze it and make interpretations of it and are often wrong. People judge books by their covers because they expect the maker of those covers to understand that that is the purpose of a cover: to give you a rundown of the book and make it catchy enough to make me want to read it. Employers use facebook because they expect people to be using their facebook in a professional manner that will tell them exactly what they want to know. --but most people don't use facebook in that manner, so it doesn't serve it's purpose. The point here can be summed up in a question: what is the purpose of facebook? --I don't think there is just ONE purpose to facebook, everyone uses it in a different way, and so when someone uses it for spying and another for keeping in contact with friends, the spy suddenly knows everything about you and your friends. Or if someone uses their page to list their work experience and someone else uses facebook to make fun of people, then someone's work experience suddenly becomes target to the joker.
If facebook was founded on private viewing of social networking, why is to public?

Let me just dive into the last MAJOR point I want to make about facebook, it might be the biggest:
Due to the culture that has morphed from facebook, people aren't people anymore. They are what they are on facebook more than they are in person. SOOOOooo many people think they are social and active, but really they mean they are social on facebook, have lots of friends, know lots of people, talk to people daily, people talk to them daily, etc. But you take those same people and put them in a social situation and they don't know the politics of navigating a room. (oh boy, that's a future topic I'll have to write about). They claim they are active when really they go jogging in the morning--does that make them active? I thought everyone was supposed to go jogging or something on that level of activity 3 times a week in order to be healthy...
I think what I am getting at is that facebook isn't reality. People lie on facebook to sound better than they are, they brag on facebook when they really have nothing to brag about, they harrass on facebook because they are small and insignificant in real life, and they look down and judge people based on what they see on facebook. One of my favorite things to observe when people don't know I'm watching them (say, at a library or in class for instance) is Guys who go around adding girls as friends who show some skin (cleavage, shoulders, thighs, tattoos, etc), or they make comments to girls like that every day. I like it because it is explainable: they do it because they're trying to find a new girl-toy, it shows they are a little on the horny/sexist side, and that they resort to online hunting because it's easier than IRL (in real life).
Facebook is kind of a creepy place when you look at it that way.

Then to top it all off, when you talk to people IRL (to reuse the term) they really have nothing going for them. They sit around on facebook all day making comments, expressing their opinions, and never DOING Anything. What kind of ethos does that give you? === you're all talk and no action. Or rather, you ARE action, but the only reason why you do the things you do is to brag about them and get publicity. How about trying to really BE an allstar rather than fake it?
Plus, IRL, people are jerks. They're flakes, they're negative, and winey, they're lazy and dull. Something in the culture has emphasized in real life that: online, people love to read negative, rude, sad, depressing things. "juicy" is the correct term. But what is juicy online is really gossip on the streets. It's a lot of drama and it's annoying.
Maybe this is just my opinion, but I prefer people who act civil, are honest and real, and who avoid causing tension. People who are real don't get on facebook, they're too busy DOING things with their life. People who are real don't get (or pretend) excited by common everyday occurrences just so that people know they fit in. (that's called being fake, and people who have a real life outside of facebook are so busy doing really exciting things that they can't take photos or pause and make comments about them). People who are civil don't pretend to be civil, I'm talking about civility at the core. A civil person can admit that they don't appreciate a situation rather than pretend to go along with it. And Honest people are too busy enjoying life the way it is and are willing to accept the consequences of everything.

So what makes me have a good ethos when I write this? --I obviously get on facebook throughout the day, so what makes me different?
Well, I guess it's time to change a little bit.
I use facebook for marketing purposes. I know less than 25% of the friends on my friends list and have met less than 10% in person. I have seen less than 20 of them in the past week in person, and talked to probably 5 in real life during that time. Facebook is my social wikipedia. I use it as a tool to broadcast about my dating blog and occasionally use it to look up information about people. (usually for rumor checking and hiring purposes). Others use it to market to me and inform me of things I don't know about and am interested in (though 90% of what I get isn't pertinent to me).

I think I'm going to tighten my privacy, cut a few things out of profile and make it less informative. --If people want to know what's going on they'll call me. if they ask for my number I'll probably give it to them. mleh.
We'll see.