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I’m Seven Weeks and Craving Butterfingers

Okay, let’s talk about it. It’s time to talk about it.

I am so completely done with the “breast cancer awareness” updates on Facebook.

Have you seen this? Have you heard of this?

Every so often, in the name of what people call “breast cancer awareness”, women private message each other a chain letter of sorts that tells them to update their Facebook status with something incredibly ambiguous that makes men wonder what the heck is going on. It will be something like ‘write what your shoe size is, followed by a sad face”. So all over Facebook you see women with things like “9 inches :(“. Which, while hilariously making men doubt the adequacy of their God-given twig and berries, does absolutely nothing to help breast cancer awareness.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that no one looked at those status updates and figured it was about time they go get a mammogram or donate money in the name of breast cancer research.

There have been bra color updates. There have been “I like it on the” updates, where ladies inserted where they put their purses and it sounded instead like a sexual innuendo. And there’s the most recent: “I’m at ______ weeks and craving ______” wherein the first blank corresponds with the month of your birthday and the second is a candy bar that corresponds with the day (list comes in the chain mail).

Ugh.

It’s like the time that everyone updated their profile pictures to cartoons in the name of Child Abuse Awareness.

What?

Anyway, I’m tired of it. Like, super tired of it. I don’t like the chains getting forwarded to me, I don’t like how snarky the messages are about men, and I don’t like how the most recent brainchild makes it look like every single woman is pregnant online.

I’m a little scared to mention anything, really. It’s kind of like the mafia. You get these messages with privileged information and you’re told not to tell men under any circumstances. I’m a little afraid that in exchange for my post on this subject, women dressed in all black will show up to my apartment in the middle of the night and smother me in my sleep.

So listen – even if they come for me, I want you to know that my judgment of stupidity shall not be silenced. Ignore the status updates. Please, let’s just all stop it. If we really want to spread a message in the name of breast cancer awareness, why don’t we grab a couple friends and say if I donate, you donate? Or update your status about the next running, walking, flying, or trapeze-ing marathon so people can be aware and participate?

Listen, I have to stop now – an angry woman is approaching my doorstep and I fear she knows.

If I don’t post tomorrow, know that I have not been smothered in vain. Just make up some stupid viral Facebook status in my honor.

Those seem to be effective. ♣

I feel aware now.

Tags: 365 Project, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011, social media

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Facebook: A New Frontier in Social Awkwardness

10 Aug

Facebook is getting so awkward, isn’t it?

Personally, I can’t take the pressure. It was bad enough when our parents, aunts, and uncles began to join. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I still manage to forget they’re in my contacts and I say something wildly inappropriate only to be scolded seconds later. Then all these apps and games and silly questionnaires came through and all the sudden I’m forced to virtually break up with my friend because she won’t stop telling me to water her virtual crops. Sure, I could just weed through my privacy settings and try to block app invites, but if my friend is the kind of person that constantly bugs me to water her fake crops, do I really want to be her friend anymore?

These are the sorts of hard-hitting questions I’m faced with every time Facebook ‘upgrades’.

Things got even more intense when Facebook leveled-up to real-time updates so that when you stare at your mini-feed you can actually see someone’s comment post at the very moment they do it. And now, the ultimate mega stresser: Facebook chat.

It could be the super awkward hermit in me, but the chat is where I draw the line. The beauty of Facebook used to be that it was casual and cool. People could post on each other’s walls at their leisure. In a world where the weight of a cell phone text or an email is so heavy that people expect a response immediately, Facebook was the one place I could still go if I wanted to socialize at a relaxed pace.

Facebook relaxation is now dead to me.

When I log on, I have updates that need tended to. I have people commenting on pictures or saying hello or writing on my wall to ask me to hang out that same day. I have messages from friends who haven’t caught up in a while and think email is too impersonal. And sometimes while I’m tending to those things, someone is online at the very same moment and responds immediately. Immediately! Then there’s all this pressure. Do I have to follow up? Can I go log off? They’re on. They see me. They know I updated only 5 seconds ago; it’s stamped right there in cold, gray text. I can’t possibly just leave – I have to finish the conversation.

I also have to manage my status updates. Because if I tell a friend I’m too busy to hang out one night but I update my status at 8:35pm saying how much I love Arrested Development, it’s voluntary incrimination. It doesn’t matter if it’s on in the background while I’m working. It doesn’t matter if I thought of a funny episode and it wasn’t even on television. That friendship is doomed.

Doomed.

Don’t even get me started on birthdays and engagements. Talk about stress! Seriously?! Every year on my birthday I have to be wished a happy birthday by hundreds of people I haven’t talked to in ages. On one hand, it’s nice to feel loved. On the other, you know that if any of those people really cared about your birthday they’d have called. Or written. Or emailed. And now I feel inclined to follow up with them to see how they are, but I don’t know if they were really reaching out or if they just wanted to hop on the birthday bandwagon.

I don’t even recognize some of their names.

I’m not the only one who feels this pressure. I know it. Because not long ago, some dear friends of mine got engaged. And while I was relishing in the happy moment with them, they admitted that they were quite exhausted because they had to be sure to call every single person that was even remotely close to them to let them know they were engaged before those people saw it on Facebook and got offended that they found out online and not from them.

You see? What are we doing to ourselves?!

So no, Facebook, I will not be utilizing your ‘Facebook Chat’. The last thing I need in this too-accessible age is to log on and be immediately available to a thousand people, try to figure out how to end conversations with everyone because I don’t want to deal with them, and then worry about what to update my status to that will be amusing but also not indicate that I was having too much ‘not-too-busy-to-chat’ fun.

Lord help us; Facebook will be the end of us all. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, facebook, Humor, Internet, life, musings, postaday2011, social media, sociology

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Eli Pariser: How Internet Personalization Feeds Us Junk

7 May

One of the occupational hazards of life as a hermit is spending an absurd amount of time considering the intricacy of mundane scenarios.

For example, yesterday I blogged about how no one should trust salad.

And lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time considering only marginally more merit-worthy: something on I dub “Mini-feed Missing Persons”.

For quite some time, I have been wondering how it’s possible that I have about a thousand Facebook friends and yet see only a fraction of them in my mini-feed. I could blame the privacy settings folks might have, but I’d venture to say I have well over 100 friends who are okay with me knowing every single aspect of their Facebook lives. I don’t say this because I’m full of myself. I say this because the majority of my friends are involved in theater, and theater people are open to a low, dirty fault. You know, for the most part.

Besides, Facebook changes its privacy settings so often that even if you started out incredibly diligent about following up with your Account Settings every time an update was made, by now you’ve probably loosened up. So what’s going on? Why am I only able to easily stalk a fraction of the friends I actually seem to have a connection with in my virtual society?

I started listening to TED lectures because they’re incredibly addictive and mind-blowing in new, brain-stretchy ways. If we could replace some of the absolute filth on television with a TED talk or few, I’m quite certain that the average IQ and general decency of society would gain 10 quality points (which, on the imaginary quality scale I just made up right now, is a whole lot). And in my recent run-in, I found Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”.

In my not-so-witty-and-straightforward summary, the idea behind Eli Pariser’s discussion is that user-generated content and targeted advertising are based on a junk food mentality. The algorithm that determines what we click on most often is actually targeting what we click on first. And that what we click on first tends to be junk food for the mind – which are the ideas we already know and like, or sometimes even trash and guilty indulgences. Eventually, we plan to get to higher-thinking activities and pages but over time it will be determined for us that we will click on the junk food most happily and most readily – and so all that’s given to us is junk food. Pariser relates the concept to our Netflix queue and how typical queues will show guilty pleasure movies being moved to the front and intellectual better-yourself movies and documentaries to the back. He says, “We all want to be someone who has watched Rashomon but right now we want to watch Ace Ventura for the fourth time.”

And wouldn’t ya know- after all this time I’ve been thinking of this Facebook friend void seemingly in my own little hermit mind, Eli Pariser comes along and talks about it as well:

“Take his Facebook page, for example. Pariser used to receive comments and links from readers on both sides of the political spectrum. Then one day he noticed his conservative friends had disappeared; only links from his liberal friends remained. Facebook, without asking him, had seen that he clicked more often on links from left-leaning friends and simply edited out the rest. The site used an algorithm that hides from view the kinds of content it has determined, from your past activity, that you are less likely to interact with.” – Excerpt from an article by Kim Zetter for Wired.com Ted 2011:Junk Food Algorithms and the World They Feed Us.

And so that’s what’s happening to all my Facebook friends. This new age of personalization on the Internet means that if I never wander over to that old high school friend I’ve been meaning to get in touch with and instead check up on my promiscuous neighbor, I will find my mini-feed devoid of said friend and chock-full of half-clothed, drunken neighbor.

What’s my point? Twofold. First, TED lectures are awesome and you should look into them. You could start with the one I’m referencing. It’s ten minutes: try it.

Second, my Facebook friends are not more visible because apparently at some point, I stopped checking up on them. As a result, they’ve been systematically weeded out. I actually have to search through my friends list for a name instead of just reading the mini-feed? Preposterous! But hey – mystery solved.

And listen – I know that I’m a millennial and all, but this affect everyone, not just mini-feed-crazy Generation Y. You’re reading this blog, you use the Internet, and you probably use Google. And it might be interesting for you to know that if you’re a conservative from Idaho and your buddy is a Liberal from Alaska, you can type the same search term into Google and be fed completely different search results.

I don’t know whether to be in awe or fear of the potential consequences. What do you think? ♣