Facebook

One of the things that I find interesting about blogging is how a seemingly innocuous post can lead to another or a series of posts. When I wrote Let’s Marry For Money I didn’t have any intention of riffing off of it again. It was supposed to be one and done.

But people plan and god laughs so here is the skinny on how this all happened. CNN linked back to the post which sent a slew of traffic here. I noticed the traffic and went to CNN and saw that a few other people had blogged about the story and decided to check out what they had said.

So I stumbled onto a blog called Kiss and Type where I came across a post that grabbed my attention with the remark below:

I personally wouldn’t get involved with someone who didn’t have a facebook page. To me it is a huge red-flag. My immediate thought is, “what does this person have to hide?”.

It caught my eye because for a long time I didn’t bother with Facebook or Twitter or a number of other social media devices. It wasn’t because I had anything to hide but because I didn’t see the value proposition in them. They didn’t offer anything to me other than another thing that would serve as a time suck and since my time is/was so limited I was hesitant to get involved in them.

For a moment I was bit nonplussed by all of this and I found myself shaking my head. It seemed so obvious to me that this was a silly line of thought on her part. But when I stopped to think about it I realized that there are some dramatic differences between us.

She is 24 and single.

I am 40, married and have two kids.

On a side note in our youth obsessed culture I have to acknowledge that I don’t like the way that it looks. I may be 40, but I don’t feel 40. I still see myself as a twenty something year old guy, but I digress.

Anyhoo, it occurred to me that maybe there is a Facebook generation gap. Now I am cool with there being a generation gap between my kids and I, that makes sense, it is natural.

But am I really old enough to say that there is a generation gap with the twenty somethings of the world? Well I guess that the answer is, sort of.

If I wanted to list my old man credentials I could point out that I was born just prior to man walking on the moon, no smoking sections were the equivalent of being environmentally friendly and people who thought that Pet Rocks and Lava Lamps were cool. Ok, I still like Lava Lamps, but I digress.

We didn’t have call waiting, answering machines, cell phones, a PDA referred to affection between two people and hip hop was something that frogs did. In fact we didn’t have roller coasters, when we wanted excitement we just flung ourselves off the top of a cliff and bounced our way down the side of the mountain.

I grew up in a world in which cleveland hadn’t won a sports championship and was made fun of. Ok, some things haven’t changed. Sorry Ezzie. 😉

What can I say, it really does feel strange, but if Facebook disappeared I wouldn’t notice. And I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to hear that someone didn’t have a Facebook page because about a third of my friends still don’t.

It is a different world out there now.

It is time for another edition of Facebook Follies, the blog posts that provide you with the key information you need to become a master of Facebook.

Ok, that is an exaggeration. Most of these Facebook posts are commentary about it, but some of them do include practical information. Take what you will from them.

Anyhoo, let’s move on and talk about Facebook Notifications. Many of us have friends who use Facebook extensively throughout the day. They take every quiz that comes along and publish the results filling our news feed with all sorts of useful information about what state they should live in, what kind of fruit/animal/superhero they are and so much more.

I don’t know about you, but I find it to be a bit tedious, tiresome and obnoxious. To be fair, I have to admit that I use a couple of Facebook apps that send out notifications. However, I try to do a couple of things to mitigate the ensuing the mess.

1) When I remember I turn off the notifications because not everyone needs to know or see that the state of Ohio has begged me to come for a visit.

2) I go through my profile and delete entries. A little cleanup of the clutter goes a long way.

3) I use lists. I have my Facebook friends divided into groups and have the privacy settings adjusted accordingly. Not everyone gets to see everything that is listed there.

Let me be clear, I don’t post things that I want to be kept secret. I assume that anything that goes up can be seen by anyone. It doesn’t mean that it will be, but it provides structure and that is useful.

Still, there is no reason to give everyone full access. There are people that I friend that do not need to know or see some things. If it happens that they stumble upon them that is one thing, but I don’t have to make it easy for them.

Let’s circle back to notifications as that is really the main point of this piece. You know who you are. You who update your account seventeen times an hour and take every quiz. You are cluttering up our feeds with nonsense and gibberish. We may love you dearly, but we don’t always need to have the knowledge that if you were a tree you’d be a Buckeye or what your birthstone says about you.

Sometimes silence is golden.

A number of my friends and I have begun playing some of the games on Facebook. A few of these games are built in such a way that in order to succeed you need to build a team. The more players on your team, the more powerful and successful you can become.

So we went out and tried to recruit new players from among our friends. Invariably quite a few of them opt not to play, some of them because they have no interest and some because they’re concerned about the time committment.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter why they don’t want to play. The end result is that you either accept that your success is limited by the size of those you can incorporate into your game or you have to go searching for like minded individuals on Facebook.

As it happens there are numerous groups of people who all want the same thing as you, success in the game. So you have the option of friending them and making them part of the team. The issue with this is that since you don’t know them you may be concerned about giving them access to your information.

The answer to this is to adjust your privacy settings and to separate your friends into groups. What happens is that you establish custom privacy settings that limit access to your information.
By doing this you can limit the information that your fellow players can see while still providing access to your trusted friends.

Upon occasion I may have mentioned that a few of the boys are in the process of getting divorced, or as one said disengaging from the “rat shit crazy woman I live with.” I am still trying to figure out what that really means, or better yet understand how you come up with that term.

Even better was bearing witness to an argument about whether the term is supposed to be “bat shit” and not “rat shit.” Either way those boys are full of crap.

The joy they tell me in losing a spouse is the fun of seeking a new partner to play with. That is a euphemism for “I really want female companionship” just not one that is legally attached to me.

Anyhoo…A few of them say that they have begun combing through Facebook for old girlfriends or girls that they wish had been more than just friends. In the process they have suddenly discovered a few things, primary among them is that none of us look like we are twenty any more.

In fact they tell me, some of these ladies look like they are middle aged. So while they cackle abou this I gleefully remind them that it goes both ways. “Listen you drunken fools, if we all graduated high school together it means that we are all the same age.”

And they of course appreciate my profundity and share their admiration by bestowing various terms of endearment upon me. Needless to say they were colorful and would have been quite appropriate for use in a Mad Lib designed for adults.

So there we are pointing, clicking and squinting at various pictures. “Can that really be Anna Rachel. It looks like it, but the picture is so small I am not quite sure,” he says. From across the room we hear “take a look at Cindy Bargedorf’s account, it is open.”

And there we see good old Cindy, she who had been exceptionally hot in that girl next door way. The years have been good to her, at least the child bearing years have because she must have 16 children and all that comes with it.

A load groan erupts and before it gets any worse I attempt to be the voice of reason again.”Dude, you have lost half your hair and have grown a bit larger, it is called life.“

Immediately afterwards I duck and those instincts prove to be correct as two or three objects go sailing by the space my head used to occupy.

A short time later the computers are all turned off and we are engaged in a riveting conversation that covers who was with who in high school, why LeBron will leave cleveland and we can’t really be middle aged can we.

Again I insist on reminding the boys that my grandparents are 95, which means that I can’t possibly be middle aged until I am at least half their age. That gives me 7.5 more years.

In the interim I think that I am going to replace all of my Facebook photos with shots of me holding Viagra, Grecian Formula 44 and a Ferrari. That sort of self deprecating humor should serve me well.

Now aren’t you glad that you spent the last three minutes reading this post. 😉