The Facebook scare

Have you ever gotten a phone call from an unknown number only to learn that the person got it from your Facebook profile? How about an unexpected instant message? Welcome to your lifetime membership into the "Facebook generation" - or so say those people who feel like every descriptive age group needs to run around with a catchy generation name.

Facebook has rubbed me the wrong way from the first time I saw it. I didn't need the recent News Feeds controversy to tell me that Facebook was a stalker network. My first exposure was from a girl who would soon join a giddy sorority - she already had hundreds of friends in 2003. I joined the Facebook some months after that only because more and more people suggested doing so. It picked up the popularity of AIM.

After looking around I quickly de-activated my account finding it creepy, materially useless, and analogous to a glorified "away message network". I was already sick of my own compulsions to check away messages instead of do homework and so Facebook didn't seem necessary.

This isn't to say that I hate Facebook and don't have an active account (indeed, I do). If you have a real life, though, the silliness of Facebook is apparent. Imagine a girl checking out a guy in her class and then once she hears his name being called on attendance goes and finds out more about him on Facebook than she probably would on a first date.

Here she unknowingly becomes part of this complicit, concealed culture with an amplified and true sense that we all know more than we're telling. What ever happened to the world of natural human relationships?

You could say that my best friends:

- can be hilarious and appreciate humor when others throw it around,

- understand that Facebook is another big joke in life and shouldn't be really used all that much,

- can hold a conversation no matter what the topic.

- have a tolerance for what "normal" people call "weird".

In closing, people should stop actually using Facebook or else realize that it's all a big showy joke, and keep in mind it's creator, Mark Zuckerberg, rolls in money and has a goofy name.