Let's Facebook The Facts

A couple of weeks ago I joined Facebook.

In case you don't know what Facebook is (Mom), it's an online community. This means that, once you join up, you get your own page. Your page has all the information you care to plug in - your name, your birthday, your religion, if you're single, married, dating, etc. You can add friends to your personal page. Usually this is done by searching for an actual friend or two, and then adding them to your list.

But something funny happens.

Say I add Larissa, who I know from High School, and Betsy, who I know from College, and Winston, my brother. I can go to their pages and read their stuff and look at their "Friends." I notice Betsy has a few people on there I used to know, and maybe we aren't that close anymore, but HEY! We used to be friends, right? And then a few of Larissa's "friends"send me requests to be "friends"... and yeah, I remember them. I wouldn't have ever said we were friends back then, exactly. I wouldn't have spoken to them if we passed in the halls. But I would definitely speak to them NOW if I saw them on the street. So, sure, I can be "friends" with them. And then I notice Winston is "friends" with this guy I went to school with until the fifth grade, so I go ahead and send HIM a friend request, and before you know it I get a friend request from someone who claims went to my grammar school AND my music school, and he remembers me, and he happens to be "friends" with my sister AND this other girl I am now "friends" with from both places, but I cannot for the life of me remember him. But what the heck - he's posted a school picture. He must be legit! So now you have a page with all these different people you used to know in one place, like a collection of your life. It's kind of like getting married, only the people here are not just the people you would invite to your wedding. They are the people you didn't know well enough. It's EVERYONE FROM YOUR LIFE.

My point is, people end up with hundreds of "friends" on these things, and I really begin to wonder what the purpose of these things are beyond collecting "friends."

Sure, there are other applications. I can take quizzes and post the results. (What Greek God are YOU?) I joined a group that revolves around reading and book reviews, and the best thing about it is that I can post the books I'm reading right on my page. I'm guessing there might be a similar group about movies. I also joined groups for my High School and my College, and that is great because I can then browse the membership for people I used to know and then invite them to be my "friends."

By far the best part of Facebook so far, for me, is Scramble. Scramble is a GAME you can play via facebook, and you can play alone or with other people. And what it is is BOGGLE. You get a square with some letters and you try to make as many words as you can out of the letters you are given, and you have three minutes, and you can't pause even if Nathan is tugging at your arm needing to use the bathroom or the baby falls off the bed. And when you do particularly well the game sends a MESSAGE to your "Friends" telling them that you have BEAT YOUR PERSONAL BEST, and now you are LEVEL THREE which is NOT GREAT, and now all those people you don't really know but kind of remember you, they probably think you are a moron because they do not KNOW about the PEEING URGENCY and the FALLING OFF THE BED and how you can NOT get THREE MINUTES OF PEACE, so it's... you know, extra challenging...

Truly, I'm addicted to Facebook, and I can sense the danger of embarrassing myself with messages to people I used to know and posting inappropriate items to my page by mistake. But I also think it's like many other online activities. I will be addicted. I will let myself be addicted. And one day - a few weeks from now - I'll get tired of it, and then four months will go by before I log in again.