The Almighty Facebook

First of all let me start this entry with a big hello to all you readers that – like me – have made it through the supposed 21/5/11 Judgement Day and Rapture. Honestly, could anyone really survive without this blog? Yeah I didn’t think so...

And now – onwards!

So.

Has anyone else noticed how creepy Facebook is becoming? I mean the whole thing is pretty odd how we each feel the need to update personal information and physical evidence of our lives to one another but it’s getting worse.

I’ve never been a huge fan... I mean I was forced into using the system by a friend who will remain nameless and since then I’ve lazily browsed this site for the past few years. I’m not one to update my profile picture every few days (or ever actually) and put up albums upon albums of photos constantly searching for comments from others – no. I am, as I said, a pretty lazy user. I admit it is good for sharing photos. Like when you go to a party and there are, like, 12 different cameras being passed from drunken hand to drunken hand and you really want that one picture of yourself jumping off the roof and swinging around on the clothesline hoping it will capture you in the process of turning back time – well Facebook provides. You no longer have to annoy every witness of this feat but just wait til that little red number comes up on the screen stating that someone has uploaded and tagged you in this act of stupidity. Brilliant.

First the site was fine. It seemed pretty normal. Not creepy and stalkerish at all. Gradually, bit by bit, the site has been tracking our movements and creating carbon copies of us in this virtual world so soon we will be rendered redundant by this technological god and forced into the dark and binary-like recesses of a miserable apocalypse. Wow, I started this out with a crackpot apocalypse theory and now I’m making my own – huh monkey see, monkey do.  

Anywho the site started getting annoying when it became bombarded with advertisements. Yes, we are use to these as avid internet surfing junkies but these were detecting our likes and dislikes and showing us ads accordingly. I mean if I said to someone that I really enjoyed drinking litres of juice without a doubt the next refresh would show an ad for “the best juice in town! Click here to know more”. What if I typed in something really crazy like “Man, I just found out that I totally love rubbing old rotting garbage over my naked body whilst watching monkeys at the zoo picking bugs out of their nostrils”? Then what? What you gonna say to that, Facebook? I shudder to think...

The next creepy thing – and this is the clincher – that I recently discovered was when I went to upload a bunch of photos (took me a while... I can tell you – I felt like an old person feels when they leave their front porch – tired and confused). Facebook then asked me to begin the laborious process of tagging each individual person in every photo only to stop me in my tracks. Facebook can now detect what you look like. Facebook had identified my face in most of the photos. Well in some of the photos – I mean if I was pulling a hilarious face... or just smiling for that matter... it needed more confirmation. At least it didn’t confuse my face with a toilet or a farm animal or something (yes I photograph a variety of objects – I don’t discriminate). The fact of the matter is Facebook is slowly gathering information on all of us and using it to further itself. I get that it’s a business and it wants to make money but holy smokes it’s trying to steal our identities! Remember that EVERYTHING you post is tracked and kept. Nothing goes away. So if you don’t want Facebook to know that you have herpes that don’t tell it (no idea why you’d want anyone else to know but you get the drift) – not even in private messages. Also the act of tagging where you are at any one time – stop taking the fun out of stalking.

In summary, we should all just start doing random and out of character things, posting weird entries (mostly about lima beans and wake boarding) and actually tagging our faces as strange stuff to confuse the all-knowing, all-powerful overlord that is Facebook.