I use Facebook; I'll not even bother denying that. I put up photos, I update my status to inform people where I am or where I'm going, and occasionally I'll post a link to some article or another I thought a bored individual or two may appreciate. If someone puts something particularly witty on their wall, I'll give them a 'thumbs up', and every now and then I'll make a remark – usually noting (thanks to the Facebook reminder) that it is their birthday and I hope it is a happy one.
As for my Relationship Status, that is nobody's business. Favourite movies and books? Quite irrelevant. A long list of current and previous employers and the schools I attended over twenty years ago are decidedly absent. I am not a 'fan' of anything on Facebook; I shudder at the thought of being a 'fan' of something as vague as a subject ambiguously entitled 'Travel' or pretentiously named 'Literature'. Back when I first joined the site, I became a member of a bunch of groups for no reason whatsoever. I should probably delete all that too, if I can ever be bothered.
The majority of my supposed Friends on Facebook aren't quite that. I have a purging session every now and then: clean out the cobwebs, remove the people whose photos I no longer peruse and whose love-lives are suitably dull as to not spark even a moment of mild curiosity in the gossip recesses of my brain. (I'm female and, whether they admit it or not, pretty much every female has a default gossip filing cabinet in her mind; it needs stocking up every few days or everything seems remarkably tedious.)
Considering that if my close friends are on Facebook I've already added them, the only people I add these days are: people I want to be darn nosy about, people I feel obligated to add otherwise there will be ripples of friction spreading through the virtual stratosphere, and people I add for the briefest of moments to catch up on their lives and then promptly delete. Usually after establishing they've never left their home town and married their next door neighbour, have produced a brood of ghastly children and are living off benefits; their photos show them on drunken nights out either in England or Ibiza (the former with pale white skin, the latter with lobster red skin), and they've usually acquired a couple of decidedly ugly and aggressive looking dogs. You wouldn't believe the number of people I was at school with who now fall into this category.
The problem with Facebook, as almost any user of it knows, is that the majority of users are artful swines who deliberately use it to manipulate or injure others. Not always, and not necessarily even consciously at times, but nevertheless it is done. The deletion of key photos; the spiteful status updates aimed at an ex – even worse, such updates that aren't spiteful but rather along the lines of, 'Look at me! Life is wonderful! I can't believe how happy I am these days!' Passive-aggressive is an art-form on Facebook. You can write on someone's Wall ostensibly to just 'pop by and say hello', but secretly to annoy the bejesus out of a partner who thought you'd lost contact with that individual.
I have seen whole relationships conducted on Facebook walls: the I Love Yous and I Miss Yous written for all the world to see. Why your entire friendship group needs to know that you miss your snuggly-wuggly is a little beyond me.
I justify using this cursed internet phenomenon for a few reasons: one, it keeps me in touch with people when I'm overseas (which, let's face it, is pretty much always). Two, it allows me to put photos up so friends can see them if they want, and not have them inflicted on them by me in some painfully drawn out evening display of My Latest Holiday. (Plus, having had a hard-drive crash, and the back-up also crash, I'm mighty glad some of those photos are there as otherwise I'd have lost them forever.) Furthermore, it allows me to satisfy that gossip-loving female mind of mine. And I talk with people using the Chat feature.
Quite frankly, a guy who uses Facebook – with all that wonderful manipulative potential just waiting to be pounced upon with the click of a few icons and tap of a few keys – is not the guy for me. A guy who does anything as frivolous as blog is not the guy for me. (MySpace doesn't even warrant a serious mention; it goes without saying that anyone who uses MySpace is painfully cretinous in the first place and therefore not welcome in my world. Likewise Twitter. Who gives a damn what the hell you had for breakfast and all that menial information people clog up the internet with via that particular site.) Facebook is designed for women and their aforementioned gossip requirements. That's it.
And after I've hopped back online to post this, I'll wander over to Facebook and see if anyone has commented on my link. It's to a conversation someone created between Mr Darcy and Mr Thornton, a wonderfully dark and brooding duo who would surely send even the most level-headed ladies into swooning ecstasies. Did I put that link up to mock all those guys on my Friends list who are ex boyfriends, or those who never even temporarily made it to 'boyfriend' status? Or to amuse the odd decently-read female who happens to be passing by my profile page? You can figure that out for yourselves, dear reader, because whatever I write on here will only ever be my conscious interpretation of events, sifted and sorted to fit with what I want you to know about me. The wonders of a virtual version of yourself: you can edit away unflattering photos, convey emotions via a series of unambiguous icons, and keep your true feelings firmly locked inside. My real friends take the time to step beyond Facebook and know what those wretched status updates fail to show.
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