While I love what the Internet has done to extend my ability to communicate with my friends, I’m realizing it’s hard not to hate it for exactly the same reason. I don’t know when the ability to judge what is (and more importantly, isn’t) appropriate to be posting in public forums became so difficult, but apparently it is and I’m really over it. Anyone who’s experienced this themselves, meaning probably anyone who’s reading this, probably agrees with me.
It’s not that I don’t see the humor in the foot-in-mouth effect FB has on its users. There’s comical diagrams and varying meme’s poking fun at the use–and abuse–of social networking websites everywhere I look, and I laugh at all of them. There’s more than enough humorous screen caps to populate whole websites with embarrassing content. Does failbook.com ring a bell with anyone?
Sometimes I worry about the fact that a not-so-private internet life could easily spill over and having a damaging effect on my real life. Read “The Web Means the End of Forgetting” if you feel like giving yourself one more thing to worry about when counting the number of questionable photos you’ve been tagged in.
The internet is supposed to be merely a tool, one we utilize when needed and then put away. I feel like Facebook has become more of a tool for forcing me into realizing how many people I know that I wish I didn’t. This goes beyond the friends that won’t stop inviting me to their resident DJ nights/shitty shows/protest marches/Farmville support groups, beyond people I didn’t like when I was in their presence regularly now feeling the urge to “reconnect” with me. As far as I can tell, all that really means upping your friend count with people from the past you probably still don’t like. Amazing, these same people that didn’t have much interest in hanging out with me ten years ago still don’t. The really problem is how FB has become the ultimate lurking tool for ‘friends’ I’m trying to get rid of.
In this case, it’s a person I’ve known since high school. We were close, then she dropped out & went off to make babies with loser dudes. Don’t get me wrong, I went off to make my own bad decisions–but mine were fixable. After I moved away and made new friends, it seemed I had successfully managed to cut this person out of my life. Until the last year or so, anyway. To give you an idea about how dedicated she is to forcing this friendship, she has started to call my mother if I ignored her for more than a week at a time. Which is amazing to me, given how this same person can’t get back to me about the money I’ve been owed for six months. Over the last month the internet has been used multiple times in attempts to e-pressure me into attending her birthday party. A birthday party I already knew would be full of drama, a fiance that technically isn’t divorced yet and who knows what other shit show elements. While it sounds like fun to watch, I’ve had my fill; I’m over it, done. I don’t want to talk or pretend we’re going to hang out when I’m not so busy; I just want us both to grow up and grow apart–a totally normal thing to do, in my mind. She just won’t let it happen, and I’ve been feeling unsure of how to handle the situation without being a prick for months.
The straw that broke this camel’s back was despite saying I probably wouldn’t make it to her birthday, she left a wall post with too many exclamation points. The persistent messaging and texts didn’t push me over the edge, but invading my e-space did. That probably says certain things about me, and I don’t care. There’s no cause for a conversation when I know it’s just going to be really dramatic and encourage further attempts to rekindle a friendship that’s been dead for years.
See what just happened right there? Maybe Facebook’s real threat to modern society isn’t that it forces us to be accountable for every little thing we say, post and reply to. It’s the ability to depersonalize each other when we act like jerks online. It’s easier to say some things in a text box than it is to look that same person in the eye while giving them a piece of your mind. That aspect I’m not too concerned about, as I have spent the past few years perfecting my sense of tact. Not like you see it much around here, but hey… “it’s just the internet.”
Print above is an original by Justine at Compai.