Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Uncle

Have you heard about this thing called Facebook?

(cue crickets chirping)

Sigh. I know. I’m the last one to cram my online butt onto this bandwagon—six years and 800 million users after the fact. I used to get emails with subjects of: “Really?” The message that followed: “How is it you’re not on Facebook?”

A friend once described the site’s allure as a great way to stay in touch without actually having to talk to anyone, which was probably the best selling point anyone could have offered me. Still, I fought it for years—years. I’d ignore emails to join, turning a deaf ear to the hue and cry about my shunning of this social networking revolution.

Maybe I fought it for so long because after working online for years I wanted to retreat a bit from the online realm. Alas, if you want to do anything anymore, like, oh, I don’t know, publish a book, that’s a veritable impossibility.

So today I signed up, slapped up a photo and then started looking around, seeing who was out there. And, this might be blasphemous, but can someone tell me what the big deal is? I expected to step into a buzzy online world that would make me think, Yes, this is why I signed up; why oh why did I wait so long?! Instead, the whole thing seems to be this compulsion to collect friends.

By that, I mean people’s walls aren’t plastered with much in the way of conversational exchanges as they are mechanical updates from Lord Facebook about accepting friend requests. Facebook, it turns out, is merely a collection site—is this that farming aspect of the site everyone talked about? The one where you had to sow and plant and then harvest until you had hundreds of friends?

Ugh, what have I become a begrudging participant in? What am I doing here at all? What….oh, God…I only have two friends. Christ! Two friends??? I’m officially the biggest social pariah on Facebook! Good God, this is worse than high school! C’mon, people, I stopped dressing monochromatically years ago!

Ok, I just checked—I have one more. That brings me up to three friends. Three whole friends. If I get the two people who read this blog to friend me, that’ll bring me up to five friends. Wait…the puppy can’t type, and I don’t think I can friend myself…can I?

I just refreshed my screen and now have four friends—and that’s without making the pup sign up for his own account. Of course, the day is young. I might very well get him an account before lunch.

Along with all of his toys.


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