Social Dis-ease

As the world continues to do what it does, I’ll leave it (mostly) to it for the moment and turn my volatile attention span on something possibly more ephemeral: Facebook.

It’s certainly here today, and I doubt it’ll be gone tomorrow, but I’m not really sure how I feel about it. It bills itself as a “social utility”, and the title seems to fit. It’s a bang-up way to do that whole six (usually less) degrees of separation thing and/or find people you used to know. Even I find it useful for that sort of thing. My issues with it are rather vague, but I’ll try to put my finger on what bothers me about it.

I think it’s the whole “friends race” that I feel is going on with it. My social life is perhaps not what it once was, but on reflection that’s not a bad thing on many counts. I have always preferred quality to quantity in the friends department, and this seems to inflate that currency.

What I mean by that is that according to Facebook, people that are acquaintances get a free upgrade to “friend”, sort of like rank inflation to make sure that during a merger your people don’t lose relative position. A bad comparison, but if I come up with a better one I’ll replace it.

What’s in a name? Well, if history and a lot of reading has anything to say about it, a LOT. I may (or may not) be rare in this regard, but I don’t call just anybody I know or have once met, much less a friend-of-a-friend one of MY friends. I won’t get into the whole system I use to denote different levels of “friendness” but I have one that I notice if I stop to think about it, which Facebook has made me do.

Now, I go on about this, but it hasn’t really happened to me, and the one or two exceptions are not actually offensive, just curious to me. There are for example people that I have known for a long time, or knew fairly well a while ago but I am not in regular contact with that I have seen on there, but I do not presume to foist myself on them as a “friend”. It’s not that I’m stuck up, but I have my ideas of how things should go, and it seems a lot of people don’t share them.

If you have noticed a lack of a real lunge for the jugular in this piece, you’re not alone. I have a nebulous feeling that all is not right with the Facebook system, but it may just be a bit of cyber enochlophobia. Hell, I don’t even like the name of it(Fb) for no reason I can think of.

In any event, it has been niggling at me, so I felt the need to say something about it. Now that is done, so I’ll start looking for the next bit of geopolitical/military foolishness to get me back in the groove.