Facebook, Limerick Contest, Jesus Music, etc.
Because I know more than two people can put together something insulting. Anyway, post before this one. Read it.
So, today for the first time in my whole damn life I wanted to update my Facebook “what are you doing?” nonsense. Usually, I just leave the same status up for days or weeks or months. Depends on my level of net based antipathy. I usually wait until someone emails me or sends a Gmail IM telling me to update. But today, today on this wonderous afternoon of rare cold and earthly beauty, I had an update.
And Facebook is broken.
Also: have you ever been getting drunk and immoral in a bar or somesuch, basically just having a good grownup time and relatives walk in? That’s sort of what happened on Facebook. Except the good time part. It is no secret that most of my family is religious. And now they want to be my friends, whcih I think is the equivalent of your mom asking for an invite to your kegger. Not that Facebook is anywhere as entertaining as a kegger, but the analogy holds. I do not want a bunch of family I have passive-aggressively kicked out of my life to know where I hang out and what I like to do.
I had a cousin (churchly motherfucker that he is) ask if I ever want to jam. Fuck, man, if I wanted to strum Jesus shit, I would still be playing guitar for my dad’s church (see aside). But really, how do you politely tell your mom she is not your Facebook friend? How do you a guy who helped you accidentally light a huge grass fire when you were kids that he’s not allowed to know what your new phone number is or what you may be doing from day to day?
This may be melodramatic, but I think this is the first generation of people to ever face this issue. People used to just move away and you never saw them again.
Aside: My dad pastored a church for fifteen years. I played in the band because I had to. I hate church music to this day, and find most religious people to be incredibly uninspired musicians. Sorry if this offends, and feel totally free to prove me wrong if this is you, but Buddy Guy tearing into Devil In Her makes me feel more human than Shine Jesus Shine makes me feel divine, regardless of how much retard Coldplay-esqu effects and hair gel are involved.
Oh yeah, stop ripping off Coldplay you lame-ass music type people in churches! At least rip off some Sabbath once in a while. But I know it generally falls on deaf ears when you try to explain to people who think God finds them wonderful how to de-lame-ass-ify themselves.
January 28, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Interesting. It makes me wonder whether we are going to evolve some kind of ‘caste’ system with friends. Friends who are ‘real’ friends and then friends who are ’second-class’ friends, who get a sort of feature-disabled access.
I have an acquaintance (I hesitate to say friend – it’s someone who I knew in highschool, but who is, it has to be said, a mind-numbingly boring person) who recently saw a profile of mine on a business community social network that I belong too and now he wants to be my ‘friend’. It started out in the most awkward way – he wanted to send me some of the music he’s done, which I know to be tragically terrible. Stupidly I took the option of politeness and said yes, without realising that there is now an exchange in place – after I received his CD, he emailed wanting to know what I thought. Now I can I either say ‘It’s appalling, stop bothering me’ or risk a continued exchange with someone I’d sooner not really engage with.
Is it possible that the vast connectedness of the net is going to cheapen relationships in the same way it has commoditized music? Lots of shit, but very few really good songs…
January 28, 2009 at 10:23 pm
“People used to just move away and you never saw them again.”
Interestingly, that was me. I’d just fucking move and problem solved. I’m not sure all the connectivity is a good thing. Every once in awhile you just need to move out into that metaphorical shack in the woods. Facebook is like putting a telephone in that shack.
Anyway, I was going to write a limerick, but I knew I couldn’t do better than the first 2 entries, so I didn’t even try.
January 29, 2009 at 9:20 am
Rev: Huh. Like you do sometimes, you managed to take the start of an idea I had and completely push it to a level that never occurred to me.
I wonder if people have always had a caste system of friends. I know I do. I have friends who I allow limited privilege access, like drinking a beer or maybe hiking, then I have higher tier access friends that I will talk big talk with and maybe shoot an animal with. Then I guess I have an IT sort of tier where people are allowed to make changes to me and really see the prompt behind the shell (not to get all goofy emo kid about it). Now that I think about it, the internet really throws those privilege systems off, mostly because I have a blog where I absolutely do not allow friends or family, but do allow people I have never met. But, if anyone does make that leap from commenter or Gmail buddy to actual fleshy friend, they almost automatically have that highest tier access to me.
Sort of weird.
DC: I think this is important. When my family was squatting in an orchard for a while between houses, we had a phone installed in a shed and it was about the weirdest thing in the world. Living in a tent was no biggie. Cooking over a fire was no biggie. But sitting in the apple shed making phone calls to people with indoor plumbing and “normal” houses really felt like calling a different planet.
And it’s too bad you’re too scared of a girl to try and win a contest.
Wuss.
January 29, 2009 at 3:29 pm
i’m going to attempt to avoid “crossing the streams” – keeping FB on the light and fluffy side, while more of me goes on the blog (to an audience of mostly strangers). my daughter and i discussed this today – and we agreed that she should NOT “friend” me on facebook – just for these reasons. She was worried i’d be offended, but in fact, i was glad she’d put some thought into it…
now, she won’t have access to all those embarassing high school pics of me wearing eyeglasses the size of endtables, and hosting gigantic zits… so there’s that…
@DC – chicken.
January 30, 2009 at 9:07 am
God. It never occured to me that my mom could start loading pictures of me on Facebook (I denied her friend request). Fuck. Friday is ruined.
January 30, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I don’t indulge in Facebook or MySpace, but my teenage stepdaughters are avid fans and I take a very keen interest in how they set up their social networks because it is utterly fascinating. ‘Friends’ appear to be some kind of merit badge – you don’t so much ‘form friendships’ as accumulate them like you might collect baseball cards. Apparently, the more friends you have, the better.
I am hugely curious to see how this will play out – presumably, a good number of friends are just tit-for-tat additions, and will disappear in time. What intrigues me is the process of ‘de-friending’ someone – making the active decision to boot someone off your friend list, essentially demoting them to a status below casually accumulated friends. How entirely humiliating! Presumably, the irritating friend I mentioned previously would just suffer this fate – something I’d never be able to do.
I’m also interested in the difference between the way teenage boys and girls utilize MySpace. Girls appear to use it as an analog for their usual friendship mechanisms, whereas boys appear to use it as a way to boast about their achievements and befriend girls. As near as I can make out, boys don’t really care so much about MySpace as a social structure, and would be far happier if girls would just come and hang out on World of War.
We’re trying to teach the girls that friendship is not something you treat lightly, nor dismiss lightly, but the concept of friendship, I fear, is irredeemably cheapened for them, at least for the moment. I wonder about the long term effects…
February 1, 2009 at 1:13 am
Apropos of this:
http://tinyurl.com/d54hsy