February 24, 2009

Confessions of a (New) Facebookaholic

Hi. I’m Mike, and I’m a Facebookaholic.

I discovered Facebook not too long ago, at the suggestion of some of my creative writing students. “It’s great,” they would tell me, “you can do all kinds of stuff.”

“And what kind of ‘stuff’ might we be talking about here?” I would ask, in my very best imitation of Mrs. Gadomski, the severe and ancient (probably 10 years younger than I am now) high school Latin teacher who inspired me to strive for greatness as an educator, and who triggered many hours of speculation among a few of us students as to what kind of man would be up to the challenge of being “Mr. Gadomski.”

My gang of young Shakespeares are every bit as persistent as they are creative, so they eventually convinced me to give Facebook a try.

The way Facebook works, you find and link up with friends through friend requests. Within minutes of signing up I started receiving friend requests from all sorts of people, and in many cases I had at least a vague idea who they were. Not wanting to seem unsociable, I accepted the friend requests from the people I could identify, and from all my “new friends” too.

After taking a closer look and weeding out all the “new” friends who had names like “Hornee McOnlinehooker,” I was ready to dive in and be a Facebook Guy.

The first thing you have to do as a Facebook Guy is post your status. You just find the little box toward the top of your home page that says “What are you doing now?” and you fill it in. Luckily for all of us, it is pretty rare for anybody to answer that question with, “Trying to think of something to write in this little Facebook box.”

Instead, people tend to come up with answers yielding deep insights into their emotional states. You see status comments like (these are real), “Jessica is orange juice orange juice orange juice orange juice,” or “Alana is RAAAAAAH.”

Every time one of your friends posts an update to their status it appears on your home page. This gives you an interesting, if cryptic and occasionally frightening, play-by-play on how each of their lives is unfolding, often with a little bit more information than you were really hoping for.

You can also post your own pictures and movies to Facebook. This gives users a chance to share their most exuberantly joyful, deeply personal or just plain silly moments with all their friends. Of course, they are also sharing those moments with a few other people – like the guy they have the job interview with next week.

From here on, Facebook gets kind of strange.

First, there are all kinds of games you can play. I almost immediately started getting something called “(Lil) Green Patch Requests,” messages saying that various friends wanted to send me things like pictures of lilies, pansies, and little cartoon people with cauliflowers and strawberries for hats.

You are apparently supposed to collect these plants and little cartoon people on your screen in a virtual garden. You can re-arrange them, rake them (I have no idea what that’s about) or steal rainbows to hang over them – and when squirrels come around you give them nuts. Somehow all of this saves the rainforest.

Kind of like the Holly Hobby version of Greenpeace.

I’ve also been kidnapped with crazy purple knockout gas, hit with a snowball, invited to a bunny fight and received a Pokémon gift of 25 Poke-bucks.

I have no clue what any of this stuff means, which I guess should not be too surprising, since Facebook was originally designed as a way for college students to kill time while they are away at school filling their heads with advanced knowledge and their laptops with computer viruses.

Anyway, I guess my addiction to Facebook is not all that bad yet. I don’t need it all that much. I mean, I could probably quit any time I want to. Really. No, really. I mean it. Any time I want to.

Or maybe I could just taper off with a little Twitter.

Next week: The Old Folks Invade Facebook

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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