The Anti-Social Network

Try to visualize the world as it is in the Social Network as though it were a real world and ask yourself, if that is a place you would like to be. It would be a world, where you were constantly surrounded by people who you sort of know but not really, often dislike, who never seem to shut the fuck up about the most random, annoying, crap imaginable. Every now and again some person you don’t know will come out of nowhere and “poke” you. People will constantly be asking you to be their friend or telling you they don’t want to be friends with you anymore like a bunch of five year olds. Everyone would be older and less attractive then how you vaguely remembered them. There would constantly be some bogus survey gauging which 80’s metal band best suits your personality being shoved in your face. Everyone would be constantly, annoyingly, attached to their significant others at all times. Everyone would have an endless supply of boring pictures that they were dying for you to look at and give your opinion on. Everyone in the world would be able to instantly give you their opinion about every single thing you did. And this entire fiasco would take place in a town called Farmville which has been gripped for years by a Mafia War of which millions of people are involved.


In the social networking world, the term “friend” is used much more loosely then in the real world. In order to be friends with someone, you just have to have spent time in the same building as them at some point in your life. You don’t have to have ever spoken with them, liked them or hung out with them. People make friends in this world just because they went to the same school or have worked in the same place, in some cases not even at the same time but they are friends because they share that vague common interest with one another. I have about 300 Facebook”friends”, here is a breakdown.

People from High School:

When you really look at it, Facebook is really just reunion.com on steroids for me. Because just about all of my friends are people that I went to High School with. In reality, I have managed to keep in contact, via phone or email or in person with the old High School Friends that I want to have as part of my life. And then Facebook came along and forged a brand new bullshit means of connectivity to a whole ton of other ones that I don’t care about and in many cases have no intention of ever speaking with again.

I can’t imagine a situation where I would ever need to converse with Joe from 11th grade shop class about anything. Or any of the girls who used to be hot and now have like 14 kids and look like sunburned sea lions slowly dying on a rocky beach someplace, in all of their photos. Or how about I strike up a chat with one of the couples, from High School, who have been married and having kids together since 1996, before we graduated, and who I am sure have never re-evaluated that decision since. The fact that I have to be reminded that these people exist is not cool. These are mental lashings that didn’t exist 8 years ago. I suppose we all need to be reminded of where we come from, even if where we come from is not memorable.

Married women who use their maiden name and then their new last name (pretty much all married women):

Everyone has dozens of these “friends”. I don’t really have a problem with this practice but it really does hammer my point home about not really being friends with people on Facebook. If you need to include whatever your last time used to be when people knew you, in order for them to recognize who you are, you are not really friends with those people. I like to think that I can recognize my true friends by sight alone without needing them to state their full names, including their given surname as though we are at the BMV or filling out foreign immigration forms on an airplane.

This is another situation that is completely indigenous to the Facebook world. In no other capacity on Earth could a single guy be friends with so many married women without getting the shit kicked out of him every 20 minutes.

People you don’t like, who keep talking to you:

It’s not so bad having friends who you don’t like sitting buried in your “friends” list. At least most of them probably don’t like you back and won’t talk to you. But at least once a month, some person, who you dislike, will leave some kind of dumbass message on your “wall”, usually asking something stupid like, “When you coming to my town again Matt?” or “We really miss you over here bud.” As though I am going to make an expensive trip halfway across the country to visit a bunch of people I hate. That’s like paying someone to hit you in the nuts with a rolling pin. And do you really miss me, really? Is that what you did today, you sat around missing people from High School who you haven’t seen or talked to in going on 20 years? Because, if you did, then that’s fucking crazy and you should probably get on some kind of serious meds.

Old work “friends”:

This is another large group of people you are friends with on Facebook. People who used to work in the same place as you did. Now I have made some great friendships through work in my life but I have not made friends with the 124 people I used to work with whom are now friends with me on Facebook. This is the group of friends who makes up the vast majority of the “I don’t even know who the fuck these people are” category. This situation is made worse in the event you left that place of work on bad terms. Now every time you scroll through your friends list, you are forced to be reminded of how you had to work someplace that you hated, in most cases for years of your life. This is another mental blow that you must endure, which did not exist prior to the magic of Social Networking.

Ex Girlfriends/Ex Boyfriends:

Breaking up with someone used to mean, you get your clothes and DVD’s back from them, you get one or two last harsh words in, you delete their number from your phone, you throw the stuff they left at your place in a river and that was pretty much it. Now, thanks to the wonderful world of social networking, this process is a lot more involved. Now, on top of everything else there are relationship status’s that must be changed, mutual friends who must be deleted before you meet someone else so they don’t act as some kind of spy for your ex, old couples photo’s that must be deleted or in more sociopathic cases, cropped so as to no longer include your ex, security settings that must be updated so that they can’t see any future photo’s or relationship status’. And if you forget a single one of these items, then god help you my friend because you are entering a world of pain. But computers are here to make our lives simpler.

People who consistently write bummer comments:

I don’t mind if every once in a while, one of my friends is bummed out and writes something on Facebook about it. Fine, you know whatever makes you feel better, I guess. But I’ve got some friends, who must feel like it is their personal calling in life, to publish every stupid little thing that goes wrong in their life to the entire world on Facebook. I don’t want to come off as completely insensitive, but I don’t need to be made aware of your ingrown toenail or a missing cat or how you feel about gas prices or the new light bulbs. Just quit bitching. Your toenail will heal, gas prices will go down, you will get used to the new light bulbs and your cat is probably dead.

People who won’t stop writing comments about political crap:

We’ve all got them. Friends, usually republican friends, who have never visited FoxNews.com, without posting a link to some article they read on their Facebook Page. Usually, accompanying their link is some kind of biased, opinionated, racist comment from them about the contents of the link. Out of my 286 friends, I currently know of one who works in any sort of political capacity. If he were to, and never does, post something political on his page, I would take it seriously. Otherwise, I don’t give a shit how my Facebook Friend Steve, who works as a night supervisor at a Valero, feels about our foreign policy in regards to South Africa as reported by Fox News.

Your guy friends who seem to have made friends with every whore on Facebook:

There are a lot of guys who seem to use Facebook as a channel to become “friends” with slutty women. It is easy to find these guys. All you have to do is look at their friends list and every other photo is of some women in a bikini or in her underwear or in a sexually suggestive position of some kind. I could understand this practice if they were ONLY friends with these sort of women and nobody else. But waters often become muddied when these men mix these sorts with their family members or their non-whore friends, or their girlfriends etc. These men usually find out the hard way, that you have no control over what anyone posts on your wall that everyone can read. And when you surround yourself with a bunch of whores, you are going to eventually get some shit posted up there that you don’t want anyone else to see. I liken it to a guy going to a strip club with his mom and his girlfriend and then knowing every single stripper in the club.

In conclusion, social networking has improved our lives in some capacities, it provides entertainment value, it does add another avenue with which we can stay in contact with each other, it, in my opinion unfortunately, gives people an outlet for their frustrations, but I am sure a lot of people think that this is a good thing. And like everything else, you take the good with the bad even if the bad far outweighs the good. There have been other advancements in communication and convenience that I can’t imagine how we ever lived without, email, cell phones etc. But I have never once asked myself, what did I ever do before Facebook?