Skip to content

Facebook friend or foe?

Marissa asked me if I had seen the new picture she had posted on Facebook this morning. When I said I hadn’t checked my Facebook page since yesterday, she gave me a look as if I lived in a cave and cooked mastodons over a wood fire for dinner. How out of touch could one person be?

“You haven’t checked your Facebook page in two days? How will you know what I’ve been doing?”

I do like Marissa, and I do want to know what she’s been doing, but not 50 times a day. Once a day. Twice a day, tops. But more than her oversharing, what really bothered me was that she seemed to think that posting something on Facebook is the same thing as putting it on the front page of a newspaper. How could anyone possibly miss what she had posted on Facebook? I hate to tell her, but for all the chatter about the death of print, a thousand times more people will see the front page of this newspaper than will ever see her status update.

But telling heavy Facebook users that you only check it once a day, or that you don’t use it at all, is like saying you don’t have indoor plumbing. How can you possibly live that way? Pretty easily, it turns out.

There are things about Facebook that I enjoy and there are things that annoy me to no end. In that way, it’s exactly like real life.

I like the quick little glimpses into the lives of my friends and relatives. My niece lives many states away and I rarely see her or her children, so I enjoy hearing about her family and seeing their pictures. But she knows what’s postworthy and what isn’t. In one post, she reported that she was walking home from the park with her 5-year-old when the kid spotted a police cruiser coming down the street. She looked at her mother and said in a stage whisper, “Mom, it’s the police. Act normal!” Even if you don’t know the kid, that’s funny.

But for every Facebook friend I have that is careful only to post things of interest, there are two Marissas who will post their shopping lists, every picture they take with their phone — even if it’s a photo of his thumb — and the news that they’ve just gotten to a new level on Candy Crush. All of this while they’re supposedly at work.

The worst offenders are the friends who post political screeds and cartoons. Unless they post screeds and cartoons that I agree with, which is automatically OK. I have no doubt that if Facebook had been around in Will Rogers’ day, his most famous quote would have been, “I never met a man I didn’t want to block.”

There was a cartoon in the New Yorker a while back that showed two people in front of a casket in a near-empty funeral home. One says to the other, “I thought there’d be more people here. He had so many friends on Facebook.” Which points out the real problem with Facebook: Nobody has 500 close friends. Or a thousand. Or however many Facebook friends you have.

There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of Facebook friends. But some people think the more they have, the happier they’ll be. As if it’s a contest.

You probably have a lot of family members on Facebook, a lot of school chums, a lot of neighbors, a lot of co-workers. But how many of them would you loan money to? How many of them would you tell about your drug or alcohol problems? How many of them want to hear about your eating disorder?

How many of those friends will call you up just to say “hi,” who don’t mind if you accidently wake them up, who miss you when you’re not around? Five hundred? Or five?

Contact Jim Mullen at JimMullenBooks.com

Leave a Comment