Facebook Fatigue

 

There’s been a number of lengthy newspaper articles in the past couple weeks of people criticising Facebook. Here’s just a couple of excerpts to give some indication that social networking, for some, has not lived up to the hype.

The first of these from the Wall Street Journal entitled How Facebook Ruins Friendships:

But I don’t give a hoot that you are “having a busy Monday,” your child “took 30 minutes to brush his teeth,” your dog “just ate an ant trap” or you want to “save the piglets.” And I really, really don’t care which Addams Family member you most resemble. (I could have told you the answer before you took the quiz on Facebook.)

“It’s called narcissism,” says Matt Brown, a 36-year-old business-development manager for a chain of hair salons and spas in Seattle. He’s particularly annoyed by a friend who works at an auto dealership who tweets every time he sells a car, a married couple who bicker on Facebook’s public walls and another couple so “mooshy-gooshy” they sit in the same room of their house posting love messages to each other for all to see. “Why is your life so frickin’ important and entertaining that we need to know?” Mr. Brown says.

Gwen Jewett, for her part, is sick of meal status updates. “A few of my friends like to post several times a day about what they are eating: ‘I just ate a Frito pie.’ ‘I am enjoying a double hot-fudge sundae at home tonight.’ ‘Just ate a whole pizza with sausage, peppers and double cheese,'” says the 49-year-old career coach in suburban Dallas. “My question is this: If we didn’t call each other on the phone every time we ate before, why do we need the alerts now?”

Twitter has contributed to the dumbing down of Facebook with short, inane comments being posted from anywhere. These next three posts are examples of the constant stream of rubbish I get from one friend:

Just can’t stop smiling…♥

Life is just a big bowl of cherries ♥

Love is in the air!!!! I am so happy!!!

Give me a break! Makes me sound like a grouch, doesn’t it, moaning about such happy, skippy comments. But I knew things were getting really dumb when a friend posted that she “was doing the ironing” and it received more responses than any other post that day.

The New York Times reports in its magazine that this sort of stuff is causing an exodus from Facebook:

Some ex-users seemed shaken, even heartbroken, by their breakups with Facebook. “I primarily left Facebook because I was wasting so much time on it,” my friend Caroline Harting told me by e-mail. “I felt fairly detached from my Facebook buddies because I rarely directly contacted them.” Instead, she felt as if she stalked them, spending hours a day looking at their pages without actually saying hello.

Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique.

The following song sums it all up and stabs right to the heart of what can be so wrong with Facebook. The title — “Are You F*cking Kidding Me?” — is an answer to the question “So you want to be my friend on Facebook?” How can it fail with lyrics like these:

I don’t wanna know what kinda cocktail you are

Or which member of the Beatles

Or which 1950s movie star

I don’t give a toss if you’re a ninja or a pirate

And I don’t give a shit what your stripper name is