If someone came up to you and said "You know what I like? I like Anchorman and The Stig and Tobey Maguire and Swindon Town" you'd do one of 3 three things:
1) Punch them full in the face
2) Raise a quizzical eyebrow and question their mental integrity
3) Run away
In addition, if said person then started reeling off a list of everybody they were friends with, regardless of whether they could corroborate that fact or not, you'd be inclined to say "Look mate, I don't know who you are or why you're in my bathroom, but do one before I call the Feds", or something similar depending on your geographical location.
All of which makes me wonder why FaceBook is so popular.
FaceBook is a website on that Internet, and it appears to be a repository for people to tell us what they like, who they know and what they're doing in excruciatingly minute detail. Now I know you can find all manner of material and niche websites on the Internet pertaining to just about any fantasy, perversion or lust you may have, but I'm yet to find anything as pretentious and utterly pointless as FaceBook. Presumably somebody must care that a friend of a friend of a colleague's sister has a hangover, otherwise why would such a medium exist?
Back in the early days of MySpace, I had a page (the very page which launched my glittering blogging career, in fact) which I used purely as a soapbox to have a right old e-whinge. I set the background to be lime green, stuck 'Popcorn' by Hot Butter on as my signature tune and left it at that. It was purely a way of contacting friends who didn't answer their telephone or texts, and for the aforementioned blogs. However, after 18 months I realised it was completely pointless maintaining it, not least because I saw the very people who visited the page on a regular basis, meaning I was effectively repeating everything I had done when I next saw them. What a waste of valuable pornography storage space that was.
I must confess that I'm the least knowledgeable FaceBook user in the world, simply because my entire experience of it is via the Mrs' page, but all it seems to be is a series of arms-length face shots depicting the page owner in the best possible aesthetic light, then a series of their various likes and dislikes, a battery of ill-lit photographs showing them partying in the grim little backwater in which they reside and a catalogue of every person who has ever conversed with them on any level whatsoever.
I can see the benefit of locating old schoolfriends or checking how fat your exes are now, but once you've contacted someone again, you swap phone numbers and/or addresses and it's job done. You don't keep them on permanent record as someone you know. I’ve got nothing against regular FaceBook users (just as well really – there’s about a billion of them) but there must come a point when they wonder whether people give a shit that it’s ‘pie and mash for tea – again’. If not, then kudos for having the energy and time to update people on your gastronomic habits, but when someone with better things to do with their time (Mario Kart for a kick-off) questions how you’ve managed to accrue 225 friends despite being a complete tosser, don’t come running to me.
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