Personally, I think Facebook is relatively a waste of my time. I took a 3 month hiatus over the summer while interning and learning the raw food lifestyle at the Creative Health Institute. Most of my communication was by snail mail and I used my cell phone very little. That was nice. And healthy.
I reactivated my account a couple of months ago when I needed to Share videos for a freelance job I did. Since then, I've stayed "plugged-in" and may be regretting it...
Facebook continues to lose its usefulness for me over the years: I no longer need to find that drunk girl I met the night before during a party in college. I can remember the majority of birthdays of my family and select friends. I am okay with being a jerk for not knowing your birthday with my lack of checking Facebook. I use to find "Events" useful... but after college, fewer friends use Facebook regularly to make an invitation reliable, ex. "Why weren't you at my birthday party man?! I sent you the FB invitation." The layout has become more and more cluttered with lame "Friend" stories and statuses. And I don't care to learn the "New" features with each frequent update.
The one thing I find Facebook useful for is to contact the friends of which I don't have their email or phone number and vice versa.
By having an active Facebook account, I still get sucked into checking it on a regular basis to see if anyone's contacted me. Afterwards, I scroll through the "News Stories" for that sixth sense of what my friends are doing far away.
The problem for me is that a lot of the "Stories" are generally lame or from people I don't know well. 99% of the time, even if you're my close friend, I don't care what you ate, what you saw, what you did. For the remaining 1% of the time, I want to read something really awesome like, "Crazy night! Got really drunk, surfed a tidal wave, and ate the raw meat of a shark after killing it with my bear hands!!!!!!!!!!!! :)" I also want that Status Update followed with an Event invitation to have a bonfire on the beach with a bunch of friends to eat the remaining shark meat while playing drums and dancing with the shark jaws.
Just the other day, I couldn't find any cool shark stories on Facebook because the Detroit Lions beat the Dallas Cowboys and are undefeated. I don't have to watch football to know that. A hundred people told me that with their Status Update. In an effort to find a good shark story, I made another effort to Unsubscribe from the Stories of people I don't know well enough and/or care.
It was at this point I discovered a new Facebook feature that gave me more options of how I can Subscribe to this crappy content: "All Updates, Most Updates, or Only Important." It was the third option that made me laugh! "Most Important." Really?! Come on Facebook! I know you're company is worth millions or billions of dollars, but this "Most Important" feature seems a little self righteous. I don't think I've ever read any "News" or anything of real importance via a Facebook Update. They certainly might exist, but they're at the bottom of the list of drunken photos from the night before and what people ate afterwards.
Actually, this "Most Important" could be a great idea! If I Subscribe to only the "Most Important" updates from all of my "Friends," I can then find out those who I should absolutely avoid. I'm very sorry to say this, but if I read that you have eaten a pizza and that is the most important thing you can tell me... Well, I'm gonna stop being your friend, both on the internet and in real life.
I'm not counting myself out on all of this either. I certainly contribute my fair share of links and status updates to clog the toilet of information which is the internet. I still contribute wasteful tweets and links about how I'm running, or eating raw food, or blah blah...
At this point I'm not sure where I'm going... So I travel 88 m.p.h far into the future while reflecting on all this rather lame information being archived on some crazy giant Google server. Here, I meet an alien riding a hover board around a Google server that stands alone amongst mountains of concrete debris and bent steel. I look to the alien, whom I've never met, and he or she says, "Welcome Lazer!"
How does this fricking alien know my name? Before I can ponder the question, the alien feeds me an entire pizza, 10 shots of booze, and takes a 100 photos of me while I vomit. What the fuck was that for alien? Hiccup! The alien captures my vomit in a large glass vile, straps it to his back, and pulls me onto his hover board. We fly towards an enormous starship and the alien explains:
I need to keep you alive! I'm well informed about your subsistence on pizza and alcohol along with your necessity of self documentation. We've got lots of questions for you!
My skin tans from the bright entrance light of the starship.
I'm an anthropologist and I've been studying the human race for millennia. We recently discovered this artifact on Earth that we call Google. From it, we've collected countless data. We've been very fortunate in our research to uncover your Facebook!
Inside the starship, I'm lead into a large cathedral with thousands of aliens and one giant alien on a thrown at the top of a thousand stairs.
Please proceed to our Leader.
I stare at the alien while trying to process all of this information. He or she pushes me forward and I now stand at the steps before their Leader. He or She begins:
Mr. Lazer, I'm impressed we have found you! Although the human species discovered time travel, very few of you have made an attempt to use it. You were all too busy documenting your present that you forgot about the past and stopped looking towards the future. We thank you for coming!
In an instant, the Leader flies down the thousand stairs feeds me an entire pizza, 10 shots of booze, and takes a 100 photos while I vomit again. Before I can wipe my mouth, he returns to his thrown at the speed of light.
Your Facebook, Mr. Lazer, is the most impressive document we have read among any other species. It's more important than anything our ownkind has authored. The last generation of humankind successfully destroyed planet Earth while documenting every single detail leading up to it. From this authoritative document, authored by every member of your species, we have insight into the last living day of Earth: We know what each of you was doing, what you liked, what you ate, what you thought, what you were feeling, what you looked like- it is truly incredible!
The Facebook, Mr. Lazer, is like a religious text or philosophy for our species. It offers us all of the insight and knowledge on how not to live. Humankind destroyed its very own environment that it created and the Facebook tells us exactly how you did it. Our species learned the secret to surviving happily and sustainably by doing the opposite of what the Facebook says. In doing so, our species and millions of others have inhabited millions of planets for millions of years. We thank you for your contribution to the Facebook. It has saved millions of lives.
Whoah!!! Facebook is very important I guess. I never looked at it that way...
Can you tell us more about the original Creator, Mark Zuckerberg?
Ummm... well I never personally met him, like in physical person you know... I think there were a few more than he... at least originally... Did you happen to see the film The Social Network?
Oh yes, the Mr. David film, very interesting indeed! We've only seen select scenes though... We uncovered a scratched Blu-Ray disk under remnants of Arizona... Tell us more!
Well, I saw it at the theater and-
Tell us, what is popcorn really like?
Well, it's like popped kernels usually covered in butter and salt that you eat-
Oh, are you hungry again?
Before I can reply, the leader flies down the stairs, stuffs me with another pizza, and 10 shots. I'm not sure if he takes my photos or if I vomit because at that point I black out.
Now I'm hungover, trying to collect my thoughts and finish this blog entry.
Lately, I was thinking that Facebook can be pretty dumb along with the people, including myself, that contribute to it. I thought that the quality of our lives may suffer from the use of Facebook and other lame technology and communication. I thought we are creating an exponentially growing clutter of crappy pointless information. I wanted to at least inspire myself and others to create better lives for themselves and better content or "Stories" that we share via Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Now I realize that I may be wrong. Every bit of information we share on the internet that may be dumb and useless now... will be very important to the survival of aliens and the Universe in the far future!
So... If you want to eat a pizza, go for it! And please tell me about it via Facebook and Twitter. And know this: For every person that "Like"s you eating pizza, one alien will be saved!
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