Losing Face with Facebook

Most of the time, I’ll just mock that which I do not understand and call it a day, which is the same approach I tried taking with social media sites like Facebook.   I do not consider myself a particularly social person to begin with, so for a long while avoiding the hoopla altogether seemed like the best defense against this rising tide of unrestrained e-friendliness.   But like a bad rash that won’t go away, these sites have spread through the veins of Pop Culture and, even more alarmingly, have made their way into the lives of my friends and family members alike.    

My wife had been hounding me for a year to put up a Facebook page and I had been making fun of her for a year for being one of those people on Facebook.  But as time passed on, there seemed to be fewer and fewer holdouts and my too-cool-for-school attitude was turning against me.   I soon learned that everyone who is anyone is doing Facebook these days, and of course the last thing I want is to be a no one.   Thus, it was now or never to see for myself what all this social media ruckus was about.    

So there I was, face to face with setting up my very own Facebook account, and all the while knowing  my wife would be serving a large plate of crow for me to eat that night for dinner once she found out.  I also couldn’t help but worry that some sort of social media karma backlash was in store for me as a result of more than a year’s worth of sarcasm and insults towards all things Facebook.  Similar to the terror of being the last kid picked in a playground soccer game, I had an overcoming sense of anxiety thinking about what happens if nobody wants to read my page or accept my invites?  I knew in my heart though that I must persevere past these fears and set up my page.  Which is what I did.         

Within 15 minutes of setting up my account, I had my very first friend invite from a girl I went to school with for a brief time while I lived in Texas.  I had maybe spoken to her three times max while I was there and have thought about her exactly none times since I left.  But in the social media world, friends are good, and I definitely wanted a friend.  What better way to quell the unease about the possibility of being the only person on Facebook to have zero friends than to accept a friend request from someone that isn’t really a friend? 

Within about an hour or so, I had friend requests from another handful of semi-familiar acquaintances from my past .  Not a single one of those requests were from a friend per say, but saying yes to these requests was a no-brainer, as it would help build my friend list.  I’d quickly learned that having a big friend list is the ultimate social media status symbol.   Having hundreds of friends on your list lets everyone else on Facebook know you are not a nobody, and the bigger your friend list gets, the less of a nobody you are.   And as I mentioned before, I do not want to be a social media nobody.     

It took a month or two, but eventually I hit triple digits with my friend list, and even more incredibly some of them were indeed “real” friends that I was fairly pleased to hear from.   I am loath to admit it, but at the very least Facebook does not suck quite as much as I thought it would.   

Now, the degree of your Facebook use is another story.   My wife is about as social of person as you will find and has a bazillion friends on her list.  She actually gets a text message to her cell phone every time someone contacts her through Facebook , which is quite often when you consider she has a bazillion friends.  But with its ceaseless beeps and rings impostering  my sleep at all hours of the night, her god forsaken text alerts makes our bedroom on most nights sound like an 80’s video arcade.   In general, I simply cannot believe the amount of people using the site, and moreover the amount of time people spend on it.   If people spent as much time on their actual job at work as they do playing on Facebook when at work, we’d have this recession whipped in no-time flat.  

I’ll provide step-by-step instructions on how not to be a no one on Twitter in my next post.  After all, nobody wants to be a social media nobody.