Facebook: How I Hate/Hate You (Sorta)

I have a hate/hate relationship with all things Facebook. Well maybe not just hate. I would say 80%/20% hate to love relationship with it. I love how we all have become connected by the triteness of posting photos of every meal we eat, and letting people know

where we are at all times. For example, Bob just checked into Red Mango. Bob is at the Times Square train station. Bob has fallen down an elevator shaft because he was walking and sending an update to Facebook and fell in. I also hate how we have become more connected because of this ubiquitous influence over our lives. I’m not exactly sure how many people are on Facebook but my guess is they are probably plugging their way towards a billion users if they aren’t there already.

I feel like Facebook gives people an excuse to waste their lives on a website instead of living with the rest of us in the real world. At any point you can go to FB and just spend endless amounts of time being nosey reading other peoples pages, and look at their photos/videos/updates, etc. And people do this all the time. I won’t lie sometimes when I am bored I go and just spend a couple of minutes seeing what people are posting. But I am not by any means a super heavy user. When I first got on FB I very quickly gained the attitude about it I still have to this day. That it is a fun distraction for a couple of minutes but eventually it will frustrate you, and probably anger you as well. I’ll explain why. You ever post something on FB with total innocence thinking there is no way anyone will be offended by me saying, “I hate the Walking Dead because it’s a show about nothing”. But the next day you get on and all of a sudden your friends are tearing you a new one because you insulted their favorite show. Unfortunately what Facebook does is rob you of context, and inflection. People cannot hear how you intend to say something or how you are putting it across. All they can do is read your stupid update and go ham based on what they think you meant. This happens way too much on FB which is one of the reasons I have Facebook free days.

Yes I long time ago I began observering two days a week where I would not get on FB at all. The reasoning was simple; I didn’t want to have my brain explode all over my keyboard while I was reading everyone’s comments that generally annoy more than interest me. So one those days I stay away from FB and all its posts, updates, feeds, and videos and I am very happy I do that. It forces me outside the FB bubble and poke my head up to see what is going on elsewhere on the net. It really is a good thing to practice. You should give it a try. I know you (yes you) like going on every day, but why not try one day where you don’t go on to tell people what you did and go outside and smell the roses.

Now for those who don’t know me that well I have always had an unofficial rule in that I have tried to keep my friends list to fewer than 100 people. I had been successful at that up until about a month ago (I am up to 107 right now as of this writing) when I started adding co-workers, and my younger cousins were getting online and allowed to create FB accounts. But I went a good 4+ years keeping my list under 100. And I always looked at it like this. I think I have maybe if I’m lucky two dozen friends. Out of those two dozen I stay in contact with maybe ten of them. Of those ten I maybe speak weekly with I’d say three or four at most. So if I really only know or speak with those few people why should I have a humongous friends list of people I barely if ever contact? I have one friend who has no joke at the time of this writing, 3,798 friends. I don’t think I have met 3,798 people in my life. Now I’m not trying to shit on his parade too much. I mean if this person likes FB that much and wants to have all these friends that’s fine. But to me it just seems like a total waste of time to add “friends” for no reason other than they sent you a friend request. To me it’s ridiculous but to each their own I guess.

I cannot stand how people will just post virtually anything on FB. Some people even post multiple anythings on my FB wall. Here is an example of some of the gold I have on my page right now. I have an ad for Charmin tissues, a photo of a cheaply made Thor outfit, a picture of someones birthday cake, an update that tells me someone is headed into the city, and that Paul Heyman may be recruiting a third man to his stable. Now while I am interested in who the third guy could be I really would be ok if I didn’t know any of that information. It’s time of my life I cannot get back. Still again I realize this is how some people fill their days with something to do.

Getting back to the main reason why I dislike FB so much is the way people misconstrue a lot of what is posted on it. You can write a statement (and this has happened to me on several occasions) and it is taken to be a potshot, attack, low blow, smear campaign on a particular person. I know one time I wrote something and my girlfriend took it as to mean I wanted to break up with her. I know I like writing things that can be interpreted as having a double meaning but sometimes people just need to just read the crap people write and not take it that everything a person writes is about them. Stop being so sensitive about FB cause it all means NOTHING. This goes for myself as well. Many times in the past the Chef and I have written to each other only to come back and ask what did that mean or what was the other one saying to me that they weren’t saying to me. Luckily for us we usually would talk in person not on FB and resolve the majority of our issues. You cannot do that on an instant messenger chat on FB. FB has the inability to be an intimate connection between people based on that fact that it is a website. So as long as FB is around people are going to twist posts for many years to come into meanings none of them were ever supposed to have. 

So you say, “J why do you keep a Facebook account if you hate it so much?” Well that is an incredibly stupid question stupid person. The reality is I still go on FB because it is many peoples preferred method of communicating life events to the world. I find out about births, engagements, new jobs, breakups, and everything else in between on FB. So in this world of connectivity it serves a purpose as being a certain amount of glue that in some ways keeps us together.

Just don’t stay to together. You need to unplug from the matrix once and awhile…
          Oh and just a little fyi. Those of you who buy a cup of coffee in the morning are wasting your time and mine by posting pictures of it. And the fact that you do it multiple times a week is criminal. Nobody and I mean nobody wants to know you drink coffee in the morning. ALMOST EVERYONE WHO WAKES UP DRINKS COFFEE IN THE MORNING AND WE DO NOT NEED TO SEE A PHOTO OF THE CUP YOU'RE GOING TO DRINK!

Wow. A cup of coffee. I have  never seen one, or drank one in the morning before. Thanks for posting!

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Facebook is what you make of it. Most people have a love / hate relationship with this platform. When things are great and your life is peachy and you have a million and one things to share with everyone that makes you look like you're better than most of the people you're friends with, then who doesn't love a little billboard to post all that good shit up on? But when things are hard, a breakup just occurred, you lost your job, you're fighting with your family, or life in general just sucks; well you can use this billboard to post your Emo shit, too.

Back in the day when camera phones came out with the capability to upload pictures instantly to your social network, everyone and anyone wanted to show you what the fuck they were eating. Being into food as my career, I can appreciate a beautifully plated dish or a towering dessert that defies gravity, but it's gotten to the point of hot dogs and salads flooding my feed, and at this point, I don't give a shit what anyone is eating. Stop it, already. Edit. Only put up the good stuff.

You have people who feel compelled to tell the world that life just sucks right now, and they put out some semi-suicidal post that only their close friends will really give a shit about. Really. Of your 500 or so "friends", how many of those people really care how you're doing today? A small handful?

Then, I'm treated to the people who post a million and one photos of their kids. That's all well and good. I have relatives in different states, and those FB photos are the only real link I have to them and their growing families. Do I really need to see an acquaintance's bathtub pics of their toddlers? No. And neither does the rest of the world who doesn't share a DNA link with you! Come on! Use a little caution when it comes to your little ones!

Memes. I love me a good meme. Some of them make me laugh. Some of them make me mad. Some of them are just corny. I come across a funny meme every now and again on the internet that I haven't seen anyone else put on on my social network feed, and I feel like I just found a golden ticket in my Wonka bar. I save my meme-sharing for the really good, really funny, really unique memes that usually get a decent response from my "friends". I often wonder about the people who have all day and night to put up like 50 of them! Most of the stuff are just re-posts from George Takei. Doesn't it get boring putting up nothing but digital-graphic internet humor that someone else thought of first?

I used to have a pretty grim outlook on FB. So much so, that I wouldn't even say "Facebook". I'd say Social Network Unnamed. It was just too much information from too many people that I really couldn't give a shit about. You have stalkers, creepers, people who take everything you say personally, people who take nothing you say seriously, people who you don't even know judging you by the pictures you take, the words you post, and the humor you like.

Now, I learned to just chill the fuck out about it. If I don't like someone; I unfriend them. If I find my feed flooded with stuff I don't want to see, I hide it. If I want to share certain things with certain people, I adjust my privacy settings. It's pretty easy to make the social network experience what you want it to be.

I don't link my other social network accounts to Facebook. I like existing in different media worlds independently of each other. I like that I have different interactions with different people in those various places that have nothing to do with one another. It keeps my perspective fresh, and it keeps my social media sites exciting. I don't want my words cloned or my pictures scattered across several platforms. You'll get a different piece of me in every network I belong to; a piece that none of the other networks get to see.

I want the people who only want to hear 140 characters of my thoughts to follow me on Twitter. I want the people who only want to know about my cakes to find me on Wordpress. If you want to share your craft brews with me, find me on Untappd. If app-stalking if your forte, I still Foursquare every now and again. You like food? Me, too!! We should both Yelp about it together! And if you're a bookworm, like me, let's connect on Goodreads. (I only have 18 friends on there. I need to meet more people who actually like books!) And if you absolutely hate everything about social networks and want to be a Social Network snob, yes I do have a Google + profile! (Put me in your circle!) Or let's just be professionals about it; LinkedIn!

I never thought of myself as being digitally, technologically or media savvy, but look at all the places I go to on the internet (or on my phone apps) where I connect with people that I seldom ever see face to face!

There is also the bad.

I spent almost a year online connected with a boyfriend who was very social. All my friends knew him. Every meal we ate together was posted. Every picture snapped of us was tagged. Every other week one of us was declaring our love for the other and we had a nice handful of folks who were kind enough to "like" it and "aww" and "you guys are so cute". It made us feel warm and fuzzy. It made social networking fun. Fast forward to when things weren't working out, and social networking was a nightmare. Breakups are never fun for anyone, but throw it under the magnifying glass of a digital network and see just how much more it can suck for everyone. Mutual friends were split in the divorce. People were blocked. Pictures had to come down or were untagged. Comments were disabled. It was a hellish nightmare that I personally never want to relive again. It was brutal, and all 300 of my "friends" saw me come undone one tearful post at a time. A breakup where both of us still "loved each other so much" but wasn't enough to make it work should have been peaceful and amicable. Add alcohol fueled nights out to "get over it" and put a smartphone in a depressed, drunk, heartbroken person's hand and watch how incredibly hostile and immature things can become. Not good times, and for my part, I regret my mistakes during that period of time.

Most recently, when I was dating a new man, he didn't make a move to try and connect online at all. At first, I was a little offended. He obviously did his Googling on me since he knew things that were only posted on various social sites. However, not a friend request was sent, not a follow button was clicked, and never once did any of my cake pictures on my website get a compliment. I didn't try to take it too seriously since he tried to explain that he "hated" social media and tried to avoid it at all costs. (I still don't really believe that.) We recently stopped seeing each other, and I have to say that I'm really grateful we never connected anywhere online. All my social media profiles were left untainted by our "relationship", and I can still function as myself without worrying about deleting him, unfriending him, blocking him, or any other erasure of his existence in any of my worlds. He was smart to keep things separate. I'll be sure to do that in the future, too. It made this last parting of ways a lot easier to deal with.

Yes, to be inundated with information I don't want to know or don't need to know can be annoying. However, there are ways to get past that. I have found over the years that Social Media can work both ways. It just depends on how you decide to use it.

Let's face it; any of my real friends know my number and they know they can text me any time; day or night! ;-) (And, no, I'm not putting my number up here. Isn't 9 links to my social networking existence enough?!)