Friends, or the people who ruined facebook

I originally signed up on facebook because it seemed a clever little time-suck. Over time, I've kept it because it provides a useful way for me to keep up with friends/family, and it still helps me kill time. I'm generally not one to post inflammatory statuses, or to make critical comments (I don't do it nearly as much as I could). But recently, I've been utterly disgusted by it.

It started last month, when I saw the "change your profile pic to a cartoon" thing start popping up on friends' statuses. The idea was that by changing your pic to some cartoon from your youth, you were helping in the fight against child abuse. This bothered me for a few reasons. First, the ridiculous idea that changing your picture to a cartoon will, by itself, raise awareness of child abuse. Second, the meme's obvious lack of connection to any organization, which is likely because it didn't begin as any kind of movement, but just someone asking their friends to change their profile pictures for no reason, like congress passing a boring bill by attaching it to something noone can disagree with. The most important reason it irked me, is that it caught on among my friends very quickly, which suggests that they didn't think the whole thing through as thoroughly or as quickly as I did. In the long run, I suppose that this was not an entirely unexpected course of action, as I tend to take a more critical approach to life than most people, but still it was just so silly, that it made me reevaluate the nature of facebook, and my relationship with it.

Facebook is by nature, a place for people to show you who they are, with all that that entails. If a person is somewhat private, then their profile will be somewhat sparse. Now, I have never been a normal person. I hold on to somewhat obscure interests, I tend to analyze things long past the point where most people stop, and because of this I tend to expect people to be more accountable for their actions than they are usually willing to be. So, I am newly aware that my friends are not like me for the most part, and that Facebook is not made for me. I'm very measured in my speech, and I don't deign to think that my opinion is of great portent to anyone, (strange, since I have a blog) so I am planning to simply use it less in favor of Twitter, a place where I can rain down my ponderings on an expanding darkness of cyberspace. I wish there was a better way to wrap that all up but it's winter break and I don't write well when I don't have school, so that is all.