The other day a friend of mine on the Facebook shared an article that was about the Facebook. I know, we're getting dangerously close to meta here but bear with me. The article was from the Huffington Post and was credited to Waitbutwhy.com. I'm sure if I went to that website I could find out the author's name somehow but despite the high level of hatred I have for the imbecile that wrote this article that's just too much damn effort for me to put forth. Oh, here be a link to the article so you can read it for yourself before I eviscerate it.
OK, I'm going to assume that you read it, or at the very least glanced at it before becoming half as enraged as I was upon reading it.
I can't even begin to imagine what an insufferable human being the author of that steaming pile must be. Apparently the sole reason people are on Facebook is to entertain this waste of space. I thought the whole idea behind Facebook was for people to, you know, share things about their lives with the people they know in any goddamn way they please. If I want to use all of my status updates to put up pictures of food that's my prerogative. Same thing if I want to post petitions to impeach Obama, songs by Nickelback or passive aggressive snipes at people I work with.
I fully understand if all of those things annoy you a little bit if you were to see them on my wall. Of course, all you have to do is not read it. Or unfriend me. Or block me. Really, the options are endless if you are looking to ignore a person on Facebook. Which is where we get to the core of what really got my goat in this article. Why does anyone, especially this fool, get to tell me what I should or shouldn't do with my Facebook?
There aren't rules for things like this. People get to use it for whatever methods they want to. With me in particular I use it to pimp things that I have written, like I will definitely do when I post this blog, and also have you seen the awesome article I did about Gwar? It's dope. Sorry, I love self promotion. I also like to put songs that I've been rocking out to, pictures of outlandish things that are entering my body (food and or drinks, pervert), dick jokes, and little life updates that I think you may be interested in.
In the article the author dismisses almost all of these things as acts of great narcissism by the poster. They posit that if I'm actually happy about getting a new job I should only text/call/talk to the few people in my life who would care. Well, I'm sorry Mr. Uppity Writer, I've already done that with the people closest to me but I still think it's notable enough to share with my Facebook friends. It's not bragging and it's certainly not done purely to build up my own self esteem. I'm telling my friends, and yes I consider all of my Facebook friends to be actual "friends" even if I'm not particularly close to some of them, something that happened in my life. What's so wrong with that?
In the eyes of this author the only reason to put up pictures of a vacation a person went on is to make others jealous. Really? I thought it was to share pictures of a cool experience you had with people you know/care about. I'm a devious jerk from time to time but this writer assumes that every single thing a person does on the Internet is aimed at making other people feel badly.
This brings us back to my key point, who in the world makes up rules for what a person can post on Facebook? It's idiotic. Remember when Darren Rovell, possibly Northwestern's most insufferable graduate which is quite a claim to fame, decided to make rules about what people can and can't do on Twitter? The result? A ton of people hating him for being an elitist prick about something as silly as Twitter.
I am Facebook friends with people for one reason and one reason alone; because I like them. Well, and you can throw a couple of ex-girlfriends and people I'd like to make future ex-girlfriends in there that I like to creep on. . . . I'm kidding. Seriously, I like every one of my Facebook friends. I actually care about what people post most of the time and I would never think that they talking about their happy relationship merely to make me feel like shit about sitting alone shirtless eating a family size thing of hot and sour soup. I would assume they were doing so because they are happy and want to share that with their friends.
I've now written way too much about Facebook. Ugh. I guess the point that I want to leave with is this; I'm going to write whatever I damn well please on my Facebook. And I expect everyone else to do the same damn thing.
