By the Bel: The Freakish Fabric of Facebook

Published April 26, 2011
Category: By the Bel, Columns

I have only been on Facebook for about a month… maybe a little more. I had been nagged, poked, prodded, invited, ordered and bugged to death to join for years, I tell you, YEARS. This insistence had been by family and friends, whom I thought loved me, and cared about my daily routine… Nope, they just wanted to point and laugh at my newfound addiction, just like the person who finally convinced them to join.

Anyways, I made the decision to sell my soul and fill out the online form; and that was hard enough as it was. Do I fill out a regular profile, or do I fill out one that people ‘like’ rather than ‘friend’? Do I use an alias or my real name? Which email account do I want 50,000 useless emails going to every day?

After all that sweating and stressing over the account that will be there until the apocalypse happens, or the government finally bans FB – which for some people is pretty much the same thing, I then have to go and add information to my profile.

You generally have a bio of yourself, a list of TV shows, Movies, Books, Music, and other assorted useless factoids to accumulate. Then you start trying to friend people. In my case, because I chose an Alias, I got SO many refusals I was starting to feel like a Nigel-no-friends. But when I worked out you can put a message with your friend request, most of the time, I got an acceptance.

After finding enough friends to make myself feel like less of a loser, my brain started ticking over as to just how many people are on FB. I did some really wonky sums in my head and realized there is bound to be at least 5 people on here from school, 2 of whom might be the girls my entire science class saw getting changed outside the sports shed in grade 11, those girls that really weren’t very nice to me at all. The ones I want to see if they got all fat and ugly… just because I can. For the record, nope, they’re still beautiful. Damn it!

With stalker hour over with, I started getting used to putting up status updates and sharing information via my wall. This task still pings me off as FB seems to have a constant case of PMS. If I want to do something, it doesn’t want to let me. If I don’t want to go somewhere it’ll hijack me and throw me there. If I’d like to log out the thing sends me to contemplate my profile settings, which, as far as I can tell, is the online equivalent of sending me to the naughty corner.
So what have I learned from my month of being on FB?

If you need to get work done, don’t log in. If you need to get somewhere on time, don’t log in. If you have a task that MUST get done, don’t log in. But if you’re bored and want to go spend a whole afternoon sitting waiting for your equally bored friends, to let you know JUST how bored they really are, then sure log in, sit down and start perusing.

The thing I DO like about FB, apart from the ability to semi-stalk people from a nice safe distance, is the connection factor. Up-to-date information in real time.

The one thing I can promise you though, is there is NO way in hell you’ll all get me sitting down and watching the movie about FB. Just being on there is enough for me.

By the way feel free to add me. Search for ‘Friday Ketchup’. I promise I won’t make you feel like a Nigel-no-friends.