*Note: whenever I say 'Crackbook' in this, it means Facebook. I'm mostly going to use genius hilarious pics from Cracked.com ...
Why did I ever bother to use it in the first place? I'll tell you why. I came to a friend's house after being out of town for a long time. It seemed all traces of him and his family were gone and his house was overrun by drunken frat boys. I knew another friend who'd probably know of his whereabouts, and I found this other guy's Crackbook page, but they would not let me send him a message unless I had a Crackbook account. So I jimmied up a quick BS one full of silly misinformation. Before I knew it, I thought it wouldn't hurt to 'add friends' and actually try to use the damn thing. Well, I gave it MORE than enough trial, a shocking 4 years. Has it really been that long? It's now time for me to pull the plug on this thing. The fact I used it first and THEN judged gives this a helluva lot more credibility. Keep in mind if Crackbook works great for you, fine. I'm not trying to force you to bail. People are different.What I am trying to do is explain why I'm going to shut down my account.
First of all, what is the appeal? Some have called Crackbook a glorified yearbook or popularity contest. Another way to see it is a hybrid of many popular programs and sites and applications that have proven useful to people in recent years. When the internet was pretty young, email caught on quick. Then live chat. Then there were special sites for reconnecting with old friends and schoolmates, for dating or social networking, or online photo albums people could post to. Blogs got pretty popular, where people could have an online journal about anything from their business to their family history. Well, Crackbook has taken all these things and more and rolled it into one neat package. Great eh?
Well in many ways not really, and you'll find out soon enough reading this. It becomes a case of do we blame how society has become for things like Crackbook, or things like Crackbook for how society's become? It's supposed to be social, but ironically it is very antisocial in many ways. It keeps us in bubbles instead of breaking free.
People are always so 'busy' and in a hurry to get nowhere. Quality has been severely diminished in favor of quantity, in terms of life itself, also in terms of our communication and how we relate to one another. An exaggerated caricature of the modern man (or woman) is this: Be a workaholic. Make lots of money, spend mostly on unnecessary things. Constantly carry a mobile device around to check Crackbook, Twitter (or Twatter as I like to call it) or any other number of popular 'social' websites. Make a log of every little thing you eat, every thing you do, every place you go. Spill out details of who you are to the point the info is exploding across the wires. Because this is very convenient see, for marketers or governments or god knows who else to tap into. I'm not speaking as some paranoiac conspiracy theorist, it just seems sensible that the world doesn't need to know every time you wipe your ass clean. In the very least, it's dreadfully boring. It perpetuates the star syndrome where everyone becomes their own narcissistic celebrity in their own little world, all other things to orbit around them. Things become fragmented and atomized...we pull further and further inside ourselves but instead of using it to bring out the divine within and gain amazing insight into life, we just hide in our shells. Lonely, we find a way to reach out our tendrils of communication to somebody, anybody who will listen. And what better vehicle than some of these 'social' websites like Crackbook?
FRIENDS:
It's kinda like this. One good friend is all you need. One kickass friend. Imagine hanging out with them old school style, lots of face to face conversation and laughs and doing cool things. To use nourishment as metaphor, think of a hearty and healthy homestyle delicious meal as this high quality relationship. Now, imagine eating a bunch of shitty candies. Sure they seem sweet and nice, but to subsist SOLELY on those? Disastrous. And your health is a big piece of shit, and you still feel an ache to eat, and you eat more and more candies and get depressed. "I don't understand, I have a THOUSAND candies! " In case you haven't guessed, the candies represent more superficial relationships. You ask someone what time it is on the street, the next thing you know you are adding them to your friend list on Crackbook? It doesn't make us selfish or bad to not care about the inner dealings of every single person we meet. It's more natural to care about our closest family and friends, and sure, help out a stranger in need. But we shouldn't have to give a flying fuck what the weatherman ate for breakfast today. To an extent, this shouldn't even matter much in the case of our friends (unless they only ate candies,har har har).
I thought, if I were going to use Crackbook at all, I'd try to do in on my own terms as much as possible. This included trying to stick to a list of friends that I could actually hang out with or talk to. You know, ACTUAL friends! It seems people build a friend list because they are afraid of looking mean by saying no to people they don't care too much about being real friends with. Or, like a scorecard they try to get a high number of friends regardless of the quality of the friendships, perhaps out of loneliness, perhaps to look cooler. There are TWO golden questions you should ask yourself when looking at a friends list:
1.Do I care if I will never see or talk to this person again?
2.If I were in the same town as this person, how often would we hang out?
If you say "YES" to question one and you'd frequently hang out with the person when nearby, chances are they are one of your best friends. In a time before all this technocracy, you'd have a small number of really solid best friends. Guess what? Even now the number will not change much. There is only so much time in a day and you CANNOT hang out with hundreds of people and spend quality time with them face to face constantly, it is mathematically impossible. This is why Crackbook works well because it helps serve the illusion you can hold onto all these relationships through a hyper functional tool. There's probably a REASON you stopped talking to so-and-so from your Grade 2 class. Life is naturally full of impermanence and change. Trying to hold on to every little friendship is like trying to extend the shelf life of an apple by 3 months, it's just trying to fight the universe and nature. A bunch of picture icons and names on a screen that you barely talk to in a REAL way is like an army of fingerpuppets to assuage your social needs. It's plain fucked.
If you say "YES" to question one, but do not hang out often with a person when in the same area, they could still be considered a good friend, but maybe not as good as a best friend.
If you say "YES" to question one and barely ever see this person when in the same area, if you care you should work on staying in contact more. If not, then let go. Come to terms with seeing the person once a year, or never.
Note I say, 'when in the same area', because it is a fair excuse if you are in opposite ends of the globe not to hang out. Provided you were tight though, you would find a way to see each other when close by.
Now, if you say, "NO" to question one, that person should not even be on your friends list, on Crackbook, or anywhere else (your mind ie).
If we are productive in our lives and doing what we are supposed to be doing in harmony with the universe, loneliness vanishes. The need for more friends vs. 'more better' friends dissolves.
It kinda makes me want to lose my lunch a bit when I realize 'friended' and 'unfriended' are treated like actual words now. They sound unbelievably stupid! Did you know there's a place you can click inside of Crackbook, to 'Edit Friends?' Really? That's so great. Editing friends! And there's a friend hunting feature so you can track down friends not on your list and add them. They even make suggestions on the side for friends. Really, I'm so fucking stupid I don't know who my friends actually are? I don't start the friendship until it's official on Crackbook? What about meeting new people online? From experience, it doesn't even come close to working as well as meeting the good ol' fashioned way. In fact it's usually pretty limp and disastrous. I'll actually admit, Crackbook is pretty good for hunting people down, provided they have accounts on it that are listed in a way to be found easily. In fact, if you recall, I originally got an account to hunt a friend down. I found a mutual friend instead, and he told me the gist of where the friend was (who was notoriously anti technology). Then messages didn't go through or something, I never got a # to call my friend or an email or anything. Probably the mutual friend logs on about once a year because he realizes how stupid Crackbook is too. Sometimes it's hard to find someone who's on there 'cos they go by a phony stupid name like I did, it's fun. So many people I reconnected with from my past, and I realized things were so different that a friendship would be pointless.
SYMBIOSIS:
One of the most enduring and insidious aspects of Crackbook is that people become parasitically pair-bonded or patterned to it to the point that they think if they erase their account, they not only lose Crackbook but their ENTIRE SOCIAL LIFE. It's like, Crackbook and your friends are so intertwined that if you 'kill' or 'shoot' Crackbook, your friends go with it.
Know what I say to that? Fuck it! If a friend refuses to contact you or share any part of their life with you outside of the context of Crackbook, were they really a friend to begin with? This is to me the single biggest reason people are afraid to trash their accounts. I really hate the fact that all my social interactions have to have the stamp of approval or wings to fly via a mega corporation started by some dweeb named Mark Zuckerberg.
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| Mark Zuckerberg. This guy owns your ass. |
E-MAIL/CHAT:
Instead of using another email and chat website, you can use these features built right into Crackbook.
E-mail and messaging itself is a useful tool if you are separated by some distance by your chums. Here's the thing though. You can EASILY pretend you never got their message and stall your reply, or just never reply. Like you could just be too busy ..maybe right?
Or, maybe the message in email form was genuinely lost in a sea of hundreds of other messages or in the spam filter or somehow did not send. So despite the fact that email is supposed to be a futuristic light speed state of the art thing, it is cluttered and ineffective. Sometimes it is as slow as 'snail mail' or traditional letter mail, if the responder chooses a late reply. In the case of messaging, you could just say you were away from the computer or your mobile device.
In any event there are enough excuses to hide behind a safe electronic webbing and no offense should be taken. Let's rewind to the time of old school answering machines on phones. It'd be a bit weird to not respond if response was expected but you could STILL drop the blame on the technology itself ("oh musta erased it by accident"..) or you could still say yr too busy. Now, let's rewind further. You are now walking in the street, and an old friend bumps into you and says hi. If you ignore them, either you are on crack or SO lost in thought you didn't notice, or you are the rudest fucker to walk away, if they are indeed a real friend.
THE WALL...THE FEED...THE MASSES:
One pseudo remedy to the above problem is to post a message on someone's wall. The wall lets you post messages and links and anything of that sort just like the email/messaging, but it is done more publicly on your friend's main page. It's kinda the centerpiece of the whole Crackbook experience. Of course, the poster can adjust privacy settings to determine who does see the post. A further filter is made when the wall's owner can erase things at their discretion, adjust privacy settings themselves, or they could even make it so nobody can post things to their wall unless
it's a comment about something they already posted. This can come in
handy if people are posting a bunch of dross and filler, and you want to
control the topics more. So anyway, all filters and privacy settings aside, if you leave a message on someone's wall and everyone else sees it, that person is going to look like a dick if they don't respond (at least if it's the type of message warranting that). Basically anything you could say in a private message can find it's way to a wall for whatever reason, but is the reason good enough?
The owner of the wall can post their own things too, and this is interesting. Instead of sending individual or even mass emails to check out this thing or that or hear this or that...they can simply post it to a wall. It's one degree less personal and more...lazy. I don't have to email a cool video to a few friends, if they want to see it they have to stumble on it on my wall. It saves me time right?
This kinda touches on the 'lost email syndrome' too because I don't have to risk sending an email and having it be lost. It's THERE on my WALL fuckers, see it? And it can stay as long as I want it to. But then it's really no solution, because , as outlined earlier, there's just not enough time in the day to spend deeply with 1000 friends (or even 50). So the chances are pretty slight that someone is going to go through their entire friend's list and heavily comb over their walls. This is where the news feed feature comes in, it'll display supposedly relevant posts from the recent past . That way you can just stay up to speed on what is CURRENT. Then it's all just like Twitter and blogging, write every little thing down. Sometimes the stuff is really neat to come across. Still, many people don't even have or make the time or carefully scan everything in the news feed. Or, they will, but a lot of it will swing the other way and eat up mountains of time -all just to find out when people flossed their cat or took a big dump (for the most part).
There are two trends I notice on walls, aside from what can be categorized as regular whatever posting. There is something called 'fun stuff' and something called the 'bait'. 'Fun stuff' is where someone gets to the notion of posting almost nothing but silly pictures and posters, the kind that are commonly found on humor sites. It's easy to get people to respond to those and comment and go 'hahaha' as opposed to some boring account of them going to the dentist or something. And even if no one comments or responds, it's such broad material that it's not taken as more personally insulting to be ignored. It could be that the 'fun stuff' poster recognizes the trivial nature of a lot of these social sites, and figures they might as well post trivial yet entertaining stuff vs. a strained attempt at deep meaningful posts about their life. It goes with the territory that it is hard to be so sincere and real over a computer screen..and the people will recognize that.
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| An example of a 'fun stuff' pic.. |
The other common trend is 'the bait'. This is where someone recognizes maybe no one is looking at their shit for a while or at all, so they devise a little game. "If you can read this, post a random type of bird to your status." Then they can easily see who saw it or who didn't. But what if someone was away camping for a week, or like me, barely logged on more than a few times a month? Then they miss that message and the baiter might think the person NEVER looks at their wall, which may not be true. But it could also be more true than not. I value my friendships, but it's a tad strange to be away from Crackbook awhile living REAL life, and finding out someone died or got married months ago. What the? It'd be nice to get a personal message or call about it, but in a way I can't blame the person because they are so busy and with so many contacts--how could they have the time to do it? It's a trap we've built. We are going so fast and processing so much information and meeting new people constantly and it's hard to just go back to old ways. But I think a step towards our roots couldn't hurt. For one thing, keeping a tight circle or family and friends and sticking to it over all the superficial relationships, and staying in healthy contact with that circle helps a lot. So simple, but it works.
As far as my wall goes, I always saw it like a whiteboard. You know, someone jots a memo on it or I post some silly video or whatever. Then I wipe it clean after awhile. I don't think if I kept every little thing on it then it would be like keeping sacred museum relics or ancient parchment or whatnot. Enjoy the moment. Appreciate the mandala aspect of things. I do remember all the comments and interaction up in my head, and value them. It's nice to take some pics or write some things down or be a bit sentimental, but if you keep EVERY little thing, ironically you lose the beauty of it. If you love it set it free.. was that it? OR...some friend writes "hey dude I'll be over there soon"...that's great, the message served its purpose, do I really have to keep it up there? I like reducing clutter. Another thing, people could be blinded by the amount of stuff I post, I'd rather just post a few neat little things, take it or leave it, then erase them. Imagine how retarded it would be if all the whiteboards and chalkboards in the world were NEVER ERASED?!
TIMELINE MORPH....THE COLD MACHINE:
The wall has recently morphed into 'timeline'. This has battled the 'whiteboard' concept for me. Now, it's supposed to be more of this 'cherished historical' thing. I just think I'd rather sit with a solid album of photos and tell a friend beside me about them. There's something to be said for SOUL inside of things. The internet can be good for basic research and sending some emails and maybe wasting a bit of time with silliness too. It sure as hell cuts down on paper and physical clutter. But it does nothing to cut out mental clutter, in fact it helps feed it. I believe in balance of all things. So if I'm going to go into 'cherished historical' mode I'm going to hold a jacket my grandpa once wore, or look at pictures of when I was a kid. Not have some corporation allow me to post 'memories' on their servers, and my timeline. I think of computers as being better for functional purposes, not sentimental ones. I'm just a bit traditional in that respect I guess.
Recently, they forced the timeline layout on me. In the past they have 'edited' some things I've posted or listed, completely without my consent. I know there have been privacy leaks and policy changes without people knowing. I REALLY don't go for that shit. In fact this has been a final trigger in my decision to leave Crackbook. For example, I wanted to be poetic and say I was 'married to madness'. Madness was not a real person to them, so I couldn't do it. I said I was from the 'school of hard knocks'. They connected that to a real place and the words themselves are a link that says how many people 'like it' and are 'talking about it' and where it is located. It takes the mystery and fun out of it. I value being creative and liberal, and they stifle the fuck out of it. The LAST place you should go for total honesty is the net. There is also no moral code on Crackbook. My friends know me enough that it's my personality to have fun with silly answers. I don't think Crackbook has business asking for piss samples and getting my blood type and all this info (they haven't REALLY.. I mean it as figure of speech).
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| Note the creeper in the corner! |
My friends already know who I am, and the silly info is an extension of my character. Some people lie for more devious purposes, like predators. I'm doing it because I recognize the whole thing as fakeass so I might as well have fun putting on my cyber mask. I thought I'd list my email as the one thing that's true for contact purposes. Well, they censored that. See they don't like people using other email from other companies like Hotmail and Gmail, so they convert the address you list into the Facebook one, and a notice just FWDS to your normal email whenever yr Crackbook acc't gets a message. There is a BAR, a % complete bar at the top of my information page, egging me on to fill in more info for them until it reaches 100%.
For what?! I did have fun switching my preferred language to 'Pirate English' under their settings recently. But that is THEIR brand of creativity, not mine. It's just a big frigid corporation that only cares for your needs if you make them money. They put up all these asinine ads to generate revenue. I heard they were BOMBING lately, like their stocks were plummeting. If you don't log on in a while, they send this 'hey here's what you are missing' mail to try to get you back on. Fuck off!
LIKES, POKES, TAGS, APPS, EVENTS ETC.:
Another horrible thing is the concept of 'like'. You can 'like' comments or posts or photos or whatever. You can also 'like' pages linked to businesses, rock bands etc. Someone posts a painting they did, say. Instead of saying 'gee Jim, I really love the way the greens contrast with the fiery reds' you can just click 'like'. That way Jim knows you like it. Once again, an instance of lazy and a step towards the less personal. There is no 'dislike' feature, only 'like'. How's that for freedom of speech? Pah! If you even call it 'speech'. You click a fucking button. "Have you talked to Sarah recently?" "No, but a month ago she clicked 'like' on my one picture of me in a banana suit." It comes again to whether society is becoming stupid first, perpetuating things such as the 'like', or things like Crackbook are making society stupid. It's the same thing on how 'friended' is now a word. We just get lazier and dumber. No, I won't think you are stupid for clicking 'like' for something I posted. I appreciate that you like something that I prolly dig as well. I just hate the idea of the feature.
Some corner ad reads 'Someone I Love Is Dying' with a button to click 'like' underneath..with a tally of all people who ever clicked 'like' in a readout below. WTF does that mean? Communication gets distorted. Do you 'like' the fact there is a support group for people who know the dying? Or do you like the fact the people are dying?? Or someone says, "I'm having a bad day". A friend clicks 'like'. You like they are having a shitty day?! Or is it you like that they are sharing the fact and you sympathize? If you like a band or business, great, you help advertise for them, more or less free. The stupid part is now 'likes' are being used as a serious measuring stick for how successful a band or business is. That's why you always see 'like us on Facebook' in business ads etc. Imagine not having enough investors or not being able to release a single because there are not enough 'likes'? What about all the people who don't use Crackbook? What about the people who clicked just because they felt pressured to do so but don't really care about the cause or the business or watever? Fucking stupid!! I read recently an article about not trusting people who don't have Crackbook accounts as they could be the next serial killer, or in the least highly antisocial etc. What a bunch of crap. They talked about some businesses only hiring people that have Crackbook profiles, that is just the kind of company I DON'T want to work for. Such shallow moronic thinking. They mentioned dating, and that someone without a profile could be more sneaky. Really? I thought it was easier to lie over a Crackbook page than in person!!
There's also a one click feature called 'poke'. This is really lame. It's a digital equivalent of, you know, poking somebody. Just how you can send digital martinis and stuff.Because you might not get the chance to touch them in real life, right ?
The poke joke goes further in that 'poke' has been slang in the past for screwing somebody. I also think it's great when it's someone's birthday.. and it's like 5 pages of people saying 'happy birthday'. They'll look jerky if they 'forget'..but I sure hope many say and do a bit more outside of that wall of the same line over and over. Everything just gets so cheapened. There's an autofiller feature on a lot of websites where you don't even have to type full words anymore!!
Another Crackbook special-you can tag people in videos and photos and notes, as if to say, here, remember you were here? Oh wait, you were too drunk. To me the tagging just adds to the whole collecting info thing, the corporation knowing every this little thing or that. For marketing purposes or something more insidious.
There are a huge number of applications you can add to your Crackbook. Silly little games, finding out how much you resemble a baboon's butt, etc. They often leech as much personal info as they can. Sometimes you even end up getting viruses on your computer. Real great. A lot of the apps exist in better versions outside of Crackbook.
Staging an event. You can create a page to invite people to your 100th bday or whatever. This actually works quite well, one of the few things that do work well within Crackbook as far as I'm concerned.
The only catch? Well, you could just as easily do a similar thing with normal email or watever.
TO CONCLUDE:
I'm sure there are even more stupid things I could talk about relating to Crackbook. I'll leave it at that for now. It's no mistake or coincidence many have wanted to and/or have left Crackbook. I've asked myself, what could I gain and lose by erasing my account?
GAIN:
*A bit less time wasted (though I barely went on before!)
*Added perspective on how I don't need some loser company to be the vehicle for my entire social life
*A stronger emphasis on actually hanging out with friends or sending them direct emails (at 'worst') instead of this discombobulated web or 'look at me, where's your world, throw me a line? who's that?'
*RAW real life. I will be napping beside a stream and doing other things in the real world more often than looking at some crapass screen.
LOSE:
*I won't be as in the loop for a lot of my friends as they post updates and photos. However most of these friends I barely see anyway. If they refuse to actually chill or talk to me outside of Crackbook, their loss, not mine.
*There are a lot of cool pics and vids I could still post, but hey it's not like I can't show these things in other ways. And no one will die if they don't see this thing or that.
