Social Apathy

Facebook. You either have an account and keep checking with those around you to see how comparatively popular you are, or you do not have an account and WON'T EVER GET ONE because you're badass and hate Facebook and all those stupid dorks who keep telling you to get on Facebook. Then people form a group with the bold Mission Statement: If 1337 "People" Join This Group Buck McFrisbie Will Join Facebook. Too bad Nazi Germany didn't have Facebook, they could have had fun groups like If 1,000,000 Fatherlanders Join This Groups Hitler Will Shave His Mustache And Invade Greenland. Interactive web-based populist politics, wait until Fox News hears about this. Good thing nobody reads this.

The reality is once you succumb and go through that first onslaught of emails and wallposts, that's pretty much it. You realize you know more people than you thought you did, met up with some people you haven't seen for a while because they moved or travelled or did other things that were cooler than you. Still, once you're adding one new friend every few months, short of adding a whole bunch of stupid applications (and receiving endless invitations to join more), that's pretty much the extent of it. As a colleague of mine wrote ("colleague" because someday we'll finally publish the most extensive, exhaustive, and surprisingly versatile triangulational oppositional pattern to date), I need a new bauble of entertainment.

Yet it's still there, so I figure, fuck the heck (scroll to the very bottom for the origin, if you care to), might as well use it for something. I use it to keep people up to date on absolutely nothing by changing my status to all kinds of random nonsense taken from popular culture, thus doing my part to add to the superfluous, ever-expanding cycle of self-reference that comprises the internet. It's like writing an academic paper, only people read it. What I noticed is how many others do this as well (well okay, everyone does it, that's what a status bar IS. I'm pointing out those who do it in detail), and how amusing it is to read their updates, often daily, and get a great idea as to how their dealing with some traumatic event. Thinking of one in particular, the Life Progress Emotional Scale began measurements at simply Reporting Event, then moved on to Dispair, to Distress, to Hopelessness, to Anger, and finally to Self-Righteousness/Self-Affirmation. An entire life story, played out for the enjoyment of several hundred friends, some of whom may actually have attempted actual, increasingly old-fashioned face-to-face contact but instead had to settle for Life Status Daily Updates. I think it's that phenomenon where it's easier to hang out with a group of people than just one other person, since with a group you never have to look at one directly. Facebook is that idea expanded, pretty easy to shout out into a huge group of people if you don't see individuals, just a crowd. And yet humans would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. Humans are stupid.