Facebook? Is that you? Hi! You remember me, don't you? We lived on the same street when we were little and I remember...Oh, wait. That was something, I wrote ON Facebook not TO Facebook.I am a little confused. It has been a rough week in the social media world (or my social media world, but isn't it one and the same?). Facebook decided to speed it up so you can see everything you friends do in real time. A running feed of every LOL ever written. Next, they will introducing a "timeline" so you can further curate the museum of you. Every breakfast, every party, every fake witty line you've written since the beginning of time. Or the beginning of Facebook. Is it the same? I told you, I am confused.
This comes the same week as the company where I work, where I spend a large part of the day on Facebook for my job, changed the software, the page layout and the ways to integrate said social media. And the software spellcheck broke, but that is a whole other headache (and I apologize ahead of time if the word "shit" accidentally gets into a headline sometime soon).
That sound you just heard was my tired eyeballs popping out of my head.
I know my job is at a start-up project owned by the corporate behemoth and I know that Facebook was a start-up project that's now sort of its own corporate behemoth, but can't we just stall like sharks who might die if they stop moving? Maybe the sharks are just tired. I know I am.
Here is my own personal Facebook timeline (in case you can't wait for the upgrade).
I was born. Then about 42 years ensued. Then I needed to get in touch with the founder of Scrabulous, and the only way I could reach him was through this thing, Facebook. So I joined. Then my account sat empty.
Then my neighbor Lisa was on Facebook, and that was great. Because even though she lives about 33 steps away from me, it is uphill, so I don't go over in person much. This way we could communicate online (which is good, because we are on opposite ends of the political aisle and that's where all lively debate belongs).
Anyway, the next thing I knew, everyone was on Facebook. Hey, it's all my college friends and their friends and anyone I ever drank a wine cooler with in the 1980s. It's all my old boyfriends and their kids' little league pictures. It's my whole high school!
I have all these young co-workers now, and I am friends with them both on their "professional" page (kind of thin, since they have only been in the profession for about a year), and their "personal" page, where there are approximately 1,700 fraternity party pictures on each profile. After a while all the straightened hair and the big red keg party cups look alike and I can't tell whose page I am reading.
But Facebook will remind me! I know that one of them is listening to The Arctic Monkeys on Spotify right now (I don't even know what that means) and that another one just checked in at Chipotle. In real time! Yay!
Meanwhile, I do not have a professional page. My personal and professional are all the same in Facebookland. I am confident there are no Jersey Shore-style pics of me dancing on a table. Crazy night out snapshots are usually of a potluck with my book club or some such middle-age pursuit.
I think we were out without sensible shoes. Woo-hoo!
In reality, I will continue with Facebook. What was a diversion has now turned into the hand that feeds me, two steps removed. But I can't help wondering if there new changes will make millions of people just say "it is too complicated, I am stepping off." Or "it is too banal, I have ADD and don't want my eighth-grade girlfriend notified every time I read Perez Hilton."
It makes me long, in theory, for a simpler time, when we got our news printed on paper a whole day later and you actually had to leave your house to get the town gossip. You were surprised when you went to your class reunion. The past was left in the past. Want to be friends? Dial a phone.
Doesn't mean I am going back there. But I admire people who do, as well as those who have not elevated it to daily use.
My mother in law, the Jewish Joan Baez, lives in a little New England town with 1,800 residents. She is actually on Facebook too, yet she also has to walk or drive to the general store to pick up her mail. She chats with the postman - he's an actual face, not a carefully crafted "this is the best picture of me ever" face - about the weather, the residents, the news, whathaveyou.
I am certain Spotify, Chipotle, LOL or Foursquare never come up. The townspeople of Westmoreland get through the day without videos of babies sneezing, knowing that Roger likes Banana Republic or that Michelle had a good night with great friends.
When they want to reset their privacy functions, they close the door. I am certain some of the 500 million Facebook will now too.
