I’m probably not the right person for Facebook. I use the service to contact people I know and also to promote a business. I never thought, though, that I’d be in a position to find out the wheres or whens of people I barely know as their various life events are recorded and disbursed to the many people who are plugged into my site alone.
It’s weird enough that classmates whose name I haven’t heard since high school have contacted me and become my Facebook Friends. I don’t converse with them, we just mutually agree that we are “friends” or that we know each other and are held together by the most distant thread. Other friends simply know of me from my Oscars website, awardsdaily.com, and they have become my friends. I find myself sometimes searching out names who have vanished from my life but I am always faced with the inevitable question: would I try to contact them?
Overall, Facebook is preferable to MySpace because it is more streamlined, less top-heavy and I never get any Facebook spam. Nonetheless, when I visit my Facebook page and it gives me all of the updates of my “friends,” I always have the sense I’m looking at something I shouldn’t be looking at. With so many millions logging onto Facebook every hour of every day, it could end up being a hub of everyone you’ve ever heard of in your entire life.
One of my friends changed his status to “in a relationship.” Another friend changed her status to “single.” That worried me. I began to wonder if I should attempt to contact this person I haven’t spoken with in over twenty years to find out why she was suddenly single? My friend who changed his status to “in a relationship” said that when he went to a party recently, everyone he knew was asking him about his new relationship.
I contemplated changing my own status from “single” to “in a relationship” just to mess with people, or maybe to prove that wasn’t as alone and pathetic as I really am. Or maybe I could put “it’s complicated” just to make it look like something was going on. They don’t have to know what that is. I mean, it isn’t really lying exactly. Is it?
Meanwhile, I see the comments people I barely know made on photographs of other people I don’t even know and am not friends with anyway. I am always tempted to click on those photos anyway, even though I don’t know these people. Sometimes I feel like commenting on them myself but then I would have to become friends with them and they’re going to wonder why. It’s complicated.
And then there are those people I have lost touch with who are friends with my friends, yet I don’t invite a friendship with them because they haven’t invited me for a friendship yet and what if they turn me down? What if my friend request evaporates? I can’t handle a Facebook rejection right now, especially when my Relationship Status still says “single.”
