Written by Facebook is insidious.
See, here’s how it works. It starts when a friend tells you about his or her recent experience with Facebook: they just created a page last week, and out of the blue was contacted by someone they went to high school with in 1987. And they’re way weirded out by it, but strangely intrigued then to see who else is out there. And they get sucked in. Finally, out of curiosity or pique or just plain boredom, you ask your friend, is it worth my time to create a Facebook page?
Probably not, they say. So you shrug and let it go.
But then they go on some more about the recent Facebook contact from a college friend, the most likely to succeed kid, who turns out to have dropped out of college in 1991 to become a sidewalk balloon animal artist in San Francisco.
You create a page and figure, what the hell, it takes two minutes and probably won’t amount to anything, but we’ll see what there is to see.
As they say, the first hit is always free.
Two months later, you’ve bookmarked your Facebook page as your browser’s home page. By this point you’ve come into contact with at least a half dozen people you went to school with, marvelling every day at the discrepancies between the memories in your head, the photos as they actually were at the time, and the people they became. It’s like a freakin’ high school reunion, only without the cover charge, airline fare and bad music. You scour the network for the Facebook pages of absolutely positively every single person you’ve ever met. You send friend invites left and right.
Somewhere along the line, you discover Facebook applications. At first, it’s just stupid stuff. Send your friend an email drink! What 80’s movie are you? That sort of thing. But sooner or later you get to the better ones, the games, and then it’s all over: you never have to leave Facebook again.
You become obsessed with your Pathwords score.
You spend your evenings marauding with grenade launchers, raiding fellow players for small fortunes in Mob Wars.
The PS3 collects dust. Your pets keep pointing to the empty food bowl in desperation.
And so it eventually comes down to this: friends of friends posting on your wall, you posting back, begging and coercing each other to join your respective Mobs, running across the girl that you had a killer crush on in the 11th grade who apparently grew up to be a complete ditz, chatting with the high school acquaintance that wouldn’t give you the time of day in 1989 but seems to think you were best friends, spending almost as much time with Facebook mail than with regular email, using Facebook IM more than regular IM, using Facebook more than you’re using the phone, posting photos, looking through your friends’ photos, commenting on their photos because they commented on yours and what the hell my GOD your hair looked so bizarre in 1989 what the HELL were you thinking, yeah I know it was a hot style in 1989 and yeah I thought so at the time and did you see what this guy does for a living have you read his blog there’s a comment there to comment on and he asked people on his Wall go to read his blog and comment on it and..
*HEAD EXPLODES*
Robert Frost was wrong. It’s neither fire nor ice. In online social networking shall the end visit upon us all.