Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Analyzing Myself: Facebook

The ever-intriguing social-network, Facebook is a topic that will seemingly always remain new and exciting to write about. It is a quite interesting experiment in sociology, tracking how people with spread information regarding their personal lives, entertainment interests, activities, etc. What's more is how otherwise normal people by day can be the world's most rampant and [either intentionally or not] most self-glorifying exhibitionists by night. In addition is this 'what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook' mentality that provokes people to rather rarely discuss their recent activities in person.

One problem I experienced with the site, and it may not have been explicitly the site's fault, but rather, the nature of my social circle and my interaction with it is that I unavoidably felt ignored. While others would be ranting a blue streak, I hopelessly would standby, unsure if such and such was expecting an immediate response from me. And whenever I would give in to the temptation of replying to a status or wall post, 9 out of 10 times would it be ignored, while the comments surrounding my own would receive comments praising user X's sense of humor, or user B's wit, all the while I began to assume a niche in which I would post strange, less conventional comments, statuses, and other contributions.

This hints at another issue in society that I believe was present before Facebook's existence, but now that Facebook is as popular as it is today, it is more pronounced. This is the collective egotism of mankind. Now that we all have our own mini-blogs, à la Twitter and Facebook, we are beginning to take this for granted and constantly expect more attention from our peers, acquaintances, friends, and family. But rarely do we fully deserve all of this attention. Most of the time, attention is rather unfairly earned using purely ruthless virtual means. People will post about a new relationship they're involved in, a film they've just seen, whatever it be, and cry to the outer heavens at the top of their lungs, saying, 'Look at me, look at me! I saw this movie, therefore, you should too! I'm so cool'. In other cases people don't know when to stop posting about something. Whether it's on every single friend's wall, or simply a constant stream of the same content, I soon become sick of the bickering.


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