“I don’t give a shit about Facebook,” Chad said. "Fuck Facebook.” He smirked. He was repeating a line from the Adam Sandler movie “Funny People” in the second half of that quote. But the first part was his honest opinion. Chad’s not big into the social networking sites like he used to be.
“I originally joined MySpace to find chicks,” he said. “That was when I was a teenager, and I would talk to girls on there. But I got on Facebook just to kind of stay in touch with people I don’t see very often, like my brother, who lives in South Dakota.”
I was sitting in Chad’s living room with him, his wife Emma, their dog Toots (pronounced like the first half of Tootsie) and our friend Jon. We had just finished watching a rather mediocre, pretentious Jon Krasinsky movie and now I was asking them the Five Questions.
Emma uses Facebook the same way her husband does. Even now, Chad and Emma are hardly ever on the site. They don’t see the need to constantly know what’s going on in the lives of their friends and acquaintances. If they need to communicate with someone, they’ll call or send a text. But there’s not much of a need for Facebook.
“I was friends with some ex-girlfriends on there, because some people added me and I didn’t want to be rude and just ignore them, so I accepted,” Chad continued. “But then, it’s like, I never talk to them on there or in real life, so I just deleted them. And Emma wasn’t too happy about me being friends with those exes, so at that point I was like, maybe I’ll just delete my account. Nothing in my life would change if I got rid of Facebook.”
“I think that’s probably true for everybody,” I responded. Although after I said it, I realized I was oversimplifying. Everyone would get along fine without social networking sites; we did for centuries. But many people use sites like Facebook and MySpace to keep in touch with even their close friends. These sites are replacing older forms of communication. My brother uses Facebook’s chat feature to contact his buddies all the time.
Some people spend hours at a time on those sites, and wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if those sites didn’t exist. And like Randy said two days earlier, people have a constant desire to be in the know. (I’ll write more about that later.) We feel like we’re left out if we aren’t always up to date with what’s going on in the lives of those around us. But not everyone feels that way. Chad and Emma certainly don’t.
“I rarely use it,” Chad said. “I mean, I’ll use Facebook to talk to some people, I guess. I used it to message Erik about something when his phone wasn’t working, because he’s on there all the time.”
Chad went on, “They have this thing now when you sign out of Facebook that says, ‘Take Facebook with you by using our mobile app,’ or something. Why would you need to know what people are up to when you’re out and about? Why do you need to know what they’re doing wherever you are?”
Chad and Emma are not alone in their views of social media, but they seem to be going against the trend. More and more people are joining Facebook and similar sites. I recently received friend requests from my uncle and a cousin, both of whom are in their 40s.
These websites started out as communication devices to connect high school and college friends. Now they’re used for relatives and acquaintances who want to say hi or just peek into the lives of those they have any sort of connection with, no matter how small. Our communications culture has developed in us a strong desire to be constantly in the know, even if what we know has no bearing whatsoever on our lives. And, as I alluded to earlier, that’s something Randy, Jon and I discussed. I’ll tell you more about that in the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment