As if I don’t have enough stuff in my life to make me dumber, friends and family micro-blogging (aka Facebook) was not helping at all. Therefore, I decided to quit Facebook and you might be wondering why. Well, probably not but bear with me, let’s say you do. I completely skipped the whole MySpace era because I was in college in graduate school so I barely had time to breathe. I had no time to waste online, and the little time I spent on the computer not coding or writing papers was spent checking my email and cleaning up the spam or clicking on the “unsubscribe” link that actually tells spammers that it is a valid email.
Anyways, I would actually read forums where knowledgeable people would gather and discuss topics and most of the time this was productive. There was a certain level of anonymity that encouraged people to be more open and actually ask questions in order to learn something. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to have these kinds of conversations in social networks. This could entirely mean that my “friends” are retards. Plenty of them are geeks that can’t admit they are wrong and end up trolling. But, they might also just pretend they know something when in fact they are clueless and make it up as they go. The problem arises mostly because access or interest to the thread is limited to your dumb friends.
This is a problem especially when you are getting fed bullshit as there is no knowledgeable person on the subject willing to explain the matter. What is even worse, the thread, post, or status, whatever you want to call it, dies pretty quickly under a pile of requests to start a mafia wars or join a mob. This limits access to a friend that actually understands the topic at hand because the thread is not out there long enough. So, instead of useful information that I could gather from well moderated forums or well written blogs, I end up being tagged in stupid pictures I am not even on, endless small talk posts and chats, and wasting time looking at my high school friends’ ugly ass naked babies. Yep, there is such a thing as an ugly baby. Thank you Facebook! I will still keep Twitter as I follow several local news websites that warn me not to go to the bank while it is being robbed and also LinkedIn since plenty of employers seem to be looking at prospective employees social network pages and LinkedIn is something I will not mind a future or current boss to read. Unless he thinks I am looking for another job because I updated my profile.
In conclusion, I would like to quote Betty White’s SNL monologue after the Facebook users campaign to get her on the show, “I really have to thank Facebook … I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite. People say ‘But Betty, Facebook is a great way to connect with old friends.’ Well at my age, if I wanna connect with old friends, I need a Ouija Board. Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had phonebook, but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon with it.”
Copyright 2011 Christian Rios
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