Mr. Zuckerberg, you have created a monster. The appropriate use of social networking along with the economic downturn, global health care inadequacies and climate change has become one of the great hurdles facing our generation. If AIM was our gateway drug, Facebook is our hopeless meth addiction.
We've become so embroiled in the world of tweets, mini-feeds and constant contact with even our most distant acquaintances that we can't see how ridiculous this cultural phenomenon truly is. I'm here to put it in simpler terms: everyone get a hold of yourselves!
One time I bumped into a friend in Collis Common Ground as she was preparing to post an album on Facebook. Looking over my friend's shoulder, I saw that she was blurring the photo in such a way as to mask the fact that you could see up her skirt. She achieved a type of effect that made it appear that she had a kind of strange uni-leg, which then split below the knee. This is my first problem with Facebook: the extraordinary opportunity it affords to make an enormous ass of yourself for the world to see.
If, as binge-drinking college students, we insist on letting beer stream down our face, or having vomit crusted in our hair, or passing out with our boobs (or other unmentionable body parts) half-exposed as a friend points at the phallic graffiti they drew on our forehead, so be it (kind of ...). But for the love of clinging to a shred of dignity, don't let your friend take a picture of you in such a state.
Before the advent of Facebook, your trickster friend could snap a couple pictures of you in your darkest hour, print them out (or get them "developed," which is something that you '13s will probably have to ask an older peer to explain) and then tastefully make them into a birthday card, April Fool's joke or blackmail to use when you become a successful politician.
Now, the art of embarrassing your friends is no more difficult then a quick click, load and tag. Indeed, this method has become so crass and overused that people don't realize that they should be embarrassed by some of the pictures posted of them. And, if you're too blinded by Facebook culture to see that you should be embarrassed, then I'm not going to be the one to tell you.
But, strangely enough, along with a diluted sense of humility, social networking tools foster and feed their users' vanity. People cultivate eccentricities and list them as "interests" and "statuses," all the while forgetting that a list of quirky hobbies or a clever quote doesn't buy you personality.
The avid Facebook user will plan out photo ops to look candid, hoping to look fun-loving and carefree. It surprises me that it's not self-evident to everyone that setting up photo ops with a Facebook profile picture in mind is a pretty good indicator that you are not, in fact, carefree.
In the world of Twitter, meanwhile, it's not what you look like, but what you're doing that's meant to convey the person that you are. It's pretty self-involved to be constantly updating your friends on your every mundane move. I'm confident in saying that unless you're Barack Obama or a resurrected Michael Jackson, no one is nearly as concerned with your every move and motivation as you are.
Finally, whatever happened to actually knowing the people you count as friends, as opposed to learning about them through looking at the information they project about themselves? We can add hundreds of people to our list of Facebook "friends" or Twitter "followers," but what's the point of having a massive web of acquaintances, when all of these relationships are, in truth, shallow?
I'm not saying that social networking doesn't have its place. Facebook makes sharing photos a breeze, and there's nothing more fun than occasionally looking up your old high school friends who are now married or have children and gawking at or judging them. Similarly, Twitter can be a useful tool.
But just because these technologies exist doesn't give us the excuse to become self-involved, shameless, social networking junkies. By all means, tweet away about how much you hate this article, but please temper it with some degree of self-respect and humility, and don't delete The Mirror from your interests.
