Right now, Facebook is trying to convince me to write on the wall of a guy I think I went to high school with to congratulate him on his fake wedding to a girl who I’m pretty sure has a fake last name. It even left me a helpful little link, right above the lists of which “friends” have birthdays today and how many outstanding (are they bills?) app requests.
This marriage was a joke, like most of the ones that show up on my newsfeed, but it still seems odd to condense one of the most important events of someone’s life into an obligatory quick “congratulations” post.
Birthdays are understandable – you’d still tell the random person walking around carrying birthday balloons “Happy birthday” – but weddings seem a little too much.
And yet, that’s what most of Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, Tumblr, Twitter and even LinkedIn) is about. I may not have seen that girl who was only in my tenth grade biology class for a month since she dropped the class, but thanks to Facebook I can know every detail of all of her failed relationships and pregnancy scares.
Occasionally, people I actually care about will appear in my newsfeed, but these few relatives and close friends are overshadowed by the hundreds of random people who I didn’t even know that well back when we actually went to the same school.
Facebook may help us keep up with relatives or long-distance friends better than if we just stuck to email or snail mail or phone calls, but it can destroy other interpersonal relationships. There’s no push to talk to the friend you haven’t seen in ages, because you both already know just about everything you’d have to chat about.
Sometimes I think about deleting the Facebook account, but I never actually do it because it seems more difficult than it should be, and because I couldn’t stand the wrath of our executive editor, a social media guru. Apparently, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram are really important for journalists.
And in some ways, they are. Facebook friends can help connect you with a vitally needed source of some random demographic, and occasionally I find tweets that can actually lead to a story idea.
Instagram, however, still only seems to provide pictures of food and people making the exact same poses with the exact same people in different outfits or in front of different backdrops.
Food can be pretty, especially if it’s the kind of grown-up food served in those snooty restaurants that spend a long time carefully and decoratively creating dishes with eggplants and non-edible leaves, but it’s not something that needs to be shared with anyone not sitting at your dining table. Besides, you’re making those of us with microwaved Top Ramen jealous.
Reach the columnist at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
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