If you ignore me, you're an ignoramus.
My friend Braxton was the first person I knew who joined Facebook. The other day, he sent an e-mail to announce that he’s also the first person to quit it. “You may have noticed that I have shut down my Facebook account,” he began. “Please don’t take this as me not wanting to stay in touch with any of you. I definitely do and you have my email and phone number, of course. But Facebook was just getting out of control.” And so it begins. Allow me to pose a huge question based on thin anecdotal evidence: Is Facebook dead?
Answer: maybe. Inane status updates are one thing, Braxton explained, but the creepy leveraging of your personal information is quite another. “You mention that you’re getting married in a message to a friend, and suddenly wedding cake companies know about it and are advertising on your web page.”
Wait, so companies can scan the topics of your Facebook conversations to send you ads? Because if that’s the case, I’m going to start a couple of businesses called Immigrants Are Ruining the Country, and No They’re Not, Glenn Beck Is. I don’t even know what they’ll sell, but based on the daily arguments on Facebook, a lot of people would see ads for my wares. Which, now that I think about it, will be tee-shirts that read, “Volcanos Are Major Ash Holes.” Then when Eyejackafrack erupts again, I’ll be rich.
Because, according to my estimates, 90 percent of Facebook is now devoted to pointless political bickering. For instance, I have two friends who’ve known each other for years. She’s conservative. He’s liberal. After a Facebook political blowout, they no longer speak to each other. For the longest time, neither of them knew or cared about the other’s political leanings. But with Facebook, it’s like you’re walking around with a bumper sticker on your forehead. And whatever that bumper sticker says, it will lead half your friends to conclude that you’re a moron and the other half to cheer your preexisting opinions. Now, I suppose you could simply refrain from commenting on political arguments, but then how will the morons know how moronic they are, and the correct people know how correct they are?
I try to stay out of Facebook brawls, but I did go through a phase when I was pretty heavy into the ’Book. I changed my profile photo more than once every six months. I became a fan of something or other. I posted a mobile update. But I knew I was starting to suffer Facebook burnout during the Kentucky Derby. The horses were heading to the gate, and a graphic showed each horse’s lifetime winnings. I thought, “Man, I hate when a horse has made more money in its lifetime than I have in mine.” Then I thought, “Hey, there’s a status update!” But then I thought, “Well, who cares, really?” Which neatly sums up most of what’s on Facebook.
Facebook must know that it needs to figure out some new angles, because it’s getting more ambitious all the time. It recently asked me, “Hey, do you mind if I go into your phone and take a stab at assigning photos to your contacts?” And I said, “Sure, Facebook, you hardly ever screw up—knock yourself out!” Now, when my brother-in-law, Rick, calls me, my phone shows the Facebook profile photo of a high-school friend named Rick. In the technology business, this is what we call Rick Synergy, and Apple and Facebook have finally made it work.
Letting Facebook get its tentacles into my phone is just one privacy issue among many. Last week, someone I know used Facebook to find photos of another friend’s new girlfriend, to prove that she was recently at a party making out with some other guy. OK, maybe they weren’t my friends. Maybe they were Pam and Michael on The Office. But they feel like my friends when I welcome them into my home each Thursday night, those rascals. The point is, stop tagging me in photos. Or at least, stick to the ones where I’m conscious and wearing pants. If you can find any.
At this point, I’m ambivalent about Facebook. We’ve seen this trajectory before, most recently with MySpace—initial enthusiasm, rapid adoption by everyone you know, then growing disillusionment. But at least MySpace was seedy and porn-infested. Facebook is the tedious airline companion of the Internet, chatting your ear off all the way across the country. But I’m not ready to quit. Not because I care that you’re tired today or that you have some new imaginary farm animals, but because I don’t want to end up like Braxton, opting out of Facebook only to have everyone make rude Amish jokes about me. Jokes that I wouldn’t even know about until they’re mentioned in a magazine column. Seeing as they’re all posted on Facebook.