facebook no more

This day has been coming for quite some time. The movement started when my dad sent me a friend request on facebook, which I promptly ignored.

It gained momentum when my dad, undaunted by my deliberate 'ignore' and my subsequent elevation of hostilities by putting a 'block' on his attempted friendship, then created a 17-year old alter ego on facebook – complete with pseudonym email address – and sent me another request.

I wasn't as shocked by the request actually so much as by the fact that his new avatar had already accumulated three friends (probably alter egos of other desperate relatives reeling from 'blocks' by their own children).

I've put up with a lot of poor behavior by the pre-1980 set on facebook, including but obviously not limited to:

• excessive, non-insightful and/or downright ludicrous comments re others’ wall posts or pictures (honest to God example: “So good to see pictures of your old friends. I invented this site after Ben introduced me to it…”) (emphasis added);

• attempting to incorporate internet shorthand into posts only to confess later that he or she has no idea what LOL actually means;

• signing of comments or wall posts with his or her name, or worse, familial descriptor (e.g., “LOL! Love the post! - Aunt Judy”); and

• over-posting pictures of children and grandchildren when everyone knows the only children anyone actually really wants to see on facebook are the bastard ones your high school classmates had out of wedlock and that caused them to get really fat and go on food stamps.*

*Ancillary to my thoughts on the hilarity of watching other people inadvertently prepping for a future appearance on The Maury Show, I really enjoyed the following clip about a mom running amok on facebook:
http://cfc.katv.com/videoondemand.cfm?id=62505
That accent put me in a great mood for a surprisingly long time.  Think I'm going to start pronouncing "in.ter.view" like that too.  Heh.


Anyway, my unrest with facebook randomly erupted into action today. I’ve decided not to post on facebook anymore and force people to check out my blog if they want to hear me rant.  So far got no compunction about my decision.  I may have scraped by barely under the generational cutoff of who ought to be on facebook without feeling deep crippling moral shame, but let no one forget that  facebook wasn't exactly designed for someone my age either.

I only ever created an account years ago because I needed to monitor whether greasy, career-destroying pictures of me were being sent into the privacy-violating abyss that is photo tagging by my much younger and exponentially hipper volleyball teammates.

"If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em," I said to myself, and created an account right after checking a dozen entries on urbandictionary.com to figure out what the fuck the junior set were talking about in addition to facebook.

Thanks to those hos, now when someone talks about “Alaskan Pipeline” in the same breath with “Sarah Palin” I’m allowed a solid chuckle.

Because I know better.