Antisocial Media

I read somewhere recently that Facebook has surpassed Google in terms of web hits, which is almost inexplicable. The only conclusion I can come to is that Farmville must be realllllly popular. I suspect most of Facebook's hit power comes from those ridiculous games and quizzes you're swamped with, which are a pestilence upon civilized discourse. Nothing can make you hate your actual friends faster.

The Brits have a great word: "pisstake". The ultimate pisstake on Facebook was the South Park episode "You Have 0 Friends". From what I can remember about the episode, everyone has Facebook and they keep telling Stan how great it is and finally, Stan gives in and signs up for a Facebook account.

As usual on South Park, things rapidly get worse from there. His parents want to friend him on Facebook and Stan - who has a life - has his father trying to "Friend" him and then his grandmother, and others, and before he knows it Stan is being harrassed by his own father wanting to know when he'll be getting around to friending his grandmother and avoid hurting her feelings. When Stan lists his status as "Single" on Facebook (he is a child, after all), his girlfriend Wendy is furious that Stan does not list himself as being in a committed relationship. Soon, everyone is up in his business and Stan's hatred of Facebook becomes well-justified.

There's a subplot - I forget how it goes - where there's some extremely lonely, friendless kid on Facebook who has zero friends, thus the title of the episode. Stan, in an act of mercy, decides to become this kid's sole Facebook friend. The kid builds this relationship into a lot more than it actually is, interpreting Stan's smileys and non-committal responses to the kid's Facebook posts as an actual conversation. Meanwhile, Stan finds his friend count on Facebook dropping and is warned by his real flesh friends that because the loner is listed on his friends page, it reflects negatively on his on-line popularity and that in order for Stan to boost his on-line popularity, he has to get more popular friends.

Unlike Stan Marsh, no one was forcing my hand in trying Facebook. Now that I'm on Facebook, I don't want to be. Once my family found out that I'm on Facebook, they insisted that I friend them. Funny, I thought that the whole point of having an on-line persona was so that you could have an on-line life completely separate from work. (Do you really want everything about yourself on-line broadcast to your immediate family? There's nothing to be ashamed of; I just need to avoid a bunch of awkward political and religious conversations.) Why would I post my daily happenings to my Facebook wall when people could just -you know - private message me on PPMB? Or e-mail? Or even better yet, call?

I would like to my Facebook profile completely - but this would lead my family asking me which social platform I'm now using, now that they're hit to the idea of social platforms. So the only point of having a Facebook profile is to serve as a "honey trap" - sort of as a platform rigged to "capture" my family while I go off and do something else. When some new app replaces Facebook - the same way Facebook replaced Myspace - I'll tell everyone I've jumped off to the new app and cancel my account with Facebook, which I've heard is a pretty slimy company. (BTW: do not put personal information on Facebook. Just don't.) Then I'll just ignore the new app.

In short, two lessons:

a) Facebook might not be the best way to reach me. Try email.
b) if I haven't friended you on Facebook, now you know why.

I also have a Twitter account, believe it or not, but none of it is devoted to on-line fandom. Primarily, it's for reading the short messages of famous people in the subculture I visit online. (Every now and then, they give up real news that I couldn't get anywhere else, unlike Facebook.) In terms of serving as a true network, it's just as lacking as Facebook is. The biggest disadvantage is that you're limited to 150 letters a Tweet. The biggest advantage is that it's geared to a pseudonym culture and it's not trying to get you to take a quiz every five minutes.

You might have guessed that my favorite form of social media is the blog. And the messageboard. And the ridiculously long essay. I'll have some quizzes and Farmville built in to Fortress CINCGREEN as soon I master the coding. But my version of Farmville will have locusts, moonshiners, tooth decay, incest and flash flooding that wipes out a year's crop.