The Facebook Haters Science Fair
Facebook, intended as a bold and glorious age of social networking, is actually this fetid wasteland where near-strangers and former high school classmates that I haven’t spoken to in many years gather to provide me with an endless stream of navel-gazing status updates that venture forth from the Realm of Too Much Information. Rashes, baby bowel movements, and bladder infections are all paraded around. As someone who carefully guards his private life, these status updates are simultaneously disturbing, horrifying, trashy, and utterly mesmerizing.
I propose sharing my pain with a Facebook Haters Science Fair. Details after the jump.
1) Take a screencap of any interestingly grotesque or disturbing or trashy status updates on your Facebook friends list.
2) Discreetly white out their names out to protect their identities. We’re jerks, but not SUPER jerks.
3) Post ’em. Share the pain.
Comments
Oh man. I’m so pumped for this.
John said:Oh man. I’m so pumped for this.
TWITTER IS ONLY THAT STUFF!!!!! IT IS ONLY STUPID FUCKING MUNDANE MUSINGS AND STATUS UPDATES!!!!! IT IS ALL THAT STUFF DISTILLED TO IT’S VERY CORE WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE AND NO OTHER INFORMATION!!!!!!
What’s your point? We could do the same thing with Twitter. I just think we’d have more fun laughing at facebook status updates cause you get updates from people you wouldn’t follow if it weren’t for the whole friend guilt thing.
I’m going to have to un-hide a lot of friend feeds for this.
My point is that if you think and agree (and I do as well, so I’m not disputing that it is) that this (the personal status updates) is a ridiculous, pointless, narcissistic and annoying aspect of Facebook then why do you champion an application that only does that one thing and nothing else? And in fact when Facebook changed it’s entire set up to make those things more prominent and have them be the main feature of the whole goddamned site you thought this was a good thing and an improvement. And if you peddle the “You only subscribe to who you want to hear about.” mantra, then the same thing can be done on facebook.
I don’t think that. I think that there are pointless, narcissistic, and annoying status updates, not that status updates are inherently pointless, narcissistic, and annoying.
90% of the time, I enjoy status updates. Case in point, I had to go back several days to find two examples that I thought would be great for this thread.
O.K. carry on. I thought you were saying that you thought status updates were annoying.
The two I found and will be uploading shortly are actually two people I had hidden. For the most part, I think I weaned out a lot of the annoying ones.
Looking at my friends’ status updates, I can honestly say that about 92.6% of them are semi-intelligent. Clever, even!
I can’t wait to see the gems that will be posted here, however. Such a wonderful idea.
But even if you like them, I don’t see how anyone can deny that it is absolutely the epitome of and very definition of narcissism? The idea that anyone, anywhere other than the people in our lives immediately impacted by our words or actions needs or wants to know what we are doing at any moment, let alone multiple moments throughout a single day is absolute narcissism.
I mean yeah, anyone who puts words on the internet (present company and self definitely included) have a (mostly) misguided belief that anyone cares about our lives and what we do and what we think, so it’s not like I’m singling out a small minority or not including myself something. But let’s call it what it is which is beyond the shadow of a doubt pure, unfiltered ego and narcissism and the people who use it the most are absolutely the most narcissistic.
Hey, Kev! This one’s for you!
holy SHIT, man. Mine are uploading to imgur now, but jesus. You win th e thread. For christ’s sake. WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE?!
Kevin said:But even if you like them, I don’t see how anyone can deny that it is absolutely the epitome of and very definition of narcissism? The idea that anyone, anywhere other than the people in our lives immediately impacted by our words or actions needs or wants to know what we are doing at any moment, let alone multiple moments throughout a single day is absolute narcissism.
I mean yeah, anyone who puts words on the internet (present company and self definitely included) have a (mostly) misguided belief that anyone cares about our lives and what we do and what we think, so it’s not like I’m singling out a small minority or not including myself something. But let’s call it what it is which is beyond the shadow of a doubt pure, unfiltered ego and narcissism and the people who use it the most are absolutely the most narcissistic.
Your general attitude seems to be that anyone who tries to have a conversation about their lives is in some way narcissistic. People just like to talk to their friends and make them laugh, that’s all. Maybe you just have shitty contacts on Facebook? I’m with Jenelle. Most of my Facebook Friends’ status updates are funny and clever.
Yeah, mine really don’t compare to Justin’s. At all. Mostly it’s just boring whiney shit.
I love you Kevin. You articulated with such grace and elegance all the feelings I have about these vile magics. Thanks be unto you!
Yeah, it absolutely is narcissistic to share that much info with that many people. And to be clear, i’ve felt that way about people who talk too much and share too many of their thoughts, opinions and life details outside of the internet.
Does Facebook really allow for so many characters?!?!
I realized over the weekend that this must be an age thing. Only maybe 20% of my contacts on facebook are under the age of 30, yet those easily account for 90% of the people doing status updates. Everyone else does at most 1, maybe 2 random status updates every couple of weeks. And the 2 or 3 older people who do them more frequently coincidentally or not coincidentally are in real life pretty needy and narcissistic people who are just as prone to oversharing and overcommunicating.
The age thing I’m guessing is just more a factor of that group of people having always had some form of the internet and just have the whole open book approach to things because it’s always been that way. I can only imagine what my news feed would look like if I had an abundance of teenaged contacts on there. Besides the fact that that would be creepy I’m guessing it would make my head explode with over-information.
Looks like someone else had a similar idea and built a whole site around it:
Wow. Did you see the last post? About cock-fighting??
Oh, J, I love you for providing a new thing for me to look at every day.