Managing My Friends

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Added: Tue. Jan 27, 2009 11:52am

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Cyber Friends are just everywhere, and you can pick them according to so much more than what they look like.  You can judge their writing skills before you invite them into your life.  You can see what THEIR friends look like if you want to, what clubs they belong to or what they ate for breakfast which is always a prerequisite for me.  I am deeply involved in a sociological study of the phenomenon that is Facebook.  Talk about ‘six degrees of separation!’  You have instant access to potential new friends, colleagues, odd ghosts from your past and even relatives you didn’t know you had.  This thing is incredible.

When I first set up my Facebook page, I thought it would be a fun thing to update on an irregular basis and to find out what my friends were up to when I had some extra time.  SHIT!  This thing has a psychological suction effect that rivals an old cowboy sucking down half of a Marlboro in one go!  It calls to you at times when you should be doing something productive.  It reaches out as you’re about to leave the room and grabs the back of your shirt collar as if to say, “Hey!  Wait a minute.  You don’t know what Peter Ashton is up to today.  Come back here and poke him.”  

You can update your profile photo, join a fan club, market your product, announce things, and even decide whether you’d like to hear and see MORE news from a certain person or LESS news about that person.  THIS is what I call management.  It’s fascinating to look at all the friends that your new cyber friend might have...clicking on that person of interest only to discover that the friend’s friend has some interesting friends as well.  By then, it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon and you started your Facebook meandering at 10 am.  

A new Facebook friend of mine who obviously isn’t familiar with the intricacies of how to manage his friends, wrote a note on his page, “I just started on Facebook a couple of months ago and now I have 1,200 friends.  Who in the hell ARE you people?”  That’s really the existential question of middle-aged people wrongly attempting to utilize a young person’s technology without a rule book and too much free time on our hands, isn’t it?  It isn’t pretty, but by God, I applaud our efforts to stay connected.  Maybe we should all just get out more often.  We’d meet people who haven’t been able to retouch their profile photos, whose breakfast stomach contents still remain a closely-held secret and whose other friends we may never know...thank God!

KK
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I do love Facebook but just for short periods of time.  It takes me a while to figure things out sometimes and so it was with Facebook.  At first I thought the idea was to get as many friends as possible.  Then if you wanted to get news out about your latest video or blog, you could let crowds of people know.

 I have changed my mind.  I got really tired of pictures of people with beers in their hands, photo albums of close-up pictures of drunk people kissing each other, and people who evidently didn’t manage to finish elementary school.  That may seem harsh but sheesh, people, I don’t want to be friends with someone who thinks a great night on the town consists of beer shooters at Hooters and after-dinner drinks in lawn chairs outside a double-wide by the dam.

Some people, it seems, have nothing better to do with their days than to sit all day at the computer and talk to people on Facebook.  What is it, do you think, that makes them think their friends on Facebook want to know when they are reading a book, going to the grocery store, or becoming friends with somebody else you’ve never heard of and using a picture of themselves at Halloween in a Vampire costume?

And how about those friends making friends?  That is constantly going on.  It reminds me of the first pages in the Bible.  Somebody begat somebody and then they begat somebody else and so forth and so on ad infinitum.  I got begat on Facebook and then I begat some others and found some who were already begat but I just didn’t know it yet.

I am now unbegatting some people that I don’t really know who send constant updates of photos of themselves and other people I don’t know all having fun and laughing, and I’m just sick of it.  How dare they have fun and send me pictures of that?  Anyway, bah humbug.

SalGal