This Column is Funny is a weekly look at the least important parts of college life.
Every decade or so, we are faced, as a generation, with a gravely important issue. When our parents were in college, they had to take sides and stand up for their beliefs on everything from the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal to the Cold War. As much as we’d like to think the world has become a nicer place since then, there are issues even today that we have to stand up and fight about. With everything that’s going on in the world today, I think it’s pretty obvious what I’m talking about.
Just when we thought we were safe, they went and changed Facebook.
If you don’t know what Facebook is, I’ll offer a quick explanation, but you should probably consider dropping out of school right away. I mean, Facebook isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things, but if you haven’t heard about it, your skills of observation are somewhere between a blind horse and a dead horse. On the bright side, I think they’re hiring at Denny’s.
Facebook.com is a social networking site created in early 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. It allows college students to create profiles and peruse the profiles of others, making “friends” and sending messages. If you’re familiar with MySpace, it’s the same kind of thing but exclusive to people in college, and Facebook works correctly more than 4.3% of the time. That’s about it. Welcome to the internet.
In the last couple of years, Facebook has blown up to monstrous proportions. There are more than 7.5 million profiles representing students from more than 2000 colleges. Checking the Facebook (also known as “Facebooking” and “creepy”) takes up approximately half of the free time in any given student’s day. Just knowing that it’s there, keeping tabs on your friends and proclaiming the name and favorite movie of that hot girl in your Soc 101 class (Kimberly, The Notebook), adds some measure of comfort to college life.
At the start of this school year, however, Facebook decided that it was time to change their site drastically. They added a bunch of flashy bells and whistles, like a “News Feed” that tracks your friends’ actions and a streamlined interface. If the old Facebook was comfortable like an old worn-in couch, the new Facebook is like a hard, badly-built chair that watches you while you shower, completely silent save for its heavy breathing. And it’s pissing people off.
Dozens of groups calling for the complete and total annihilation of Facebook’s new features sprang up in the span of a couple days. People called for drastic action – petitions, boycotts! Facebook made the fatal mistake of treading on us, which we have repeatedly, as Americans, confessed that we aren’t really cool with. Facebookers all over the country fought back.
I, meanwhile, sat back and played with my brother’s XboX.
You see, complaining about Facebook is a lot like arguing about which episode of The Simple Life is the best; it’s completely unnecessary and, at times, a little nauseating. I hate to break it to you, but if you’re willing to take time out of your day to set terms with a website where thousands of people think Old School is an important part of cinema history, you’re taking the internet too seriously.
The changes made to Facebook are not – and I can’t be totally certain of this – the end of the world as we know it. Snow will still fall this winter. The world will still turn. That drunken message you sent your ex will still, without fail, get through before you can unsend it. Maybe it’s time for you to take a few days off from Facebook, turn off your computer, and take a look at the bright world around you.
I’m pretty sure The Notebook is on cable this weekend.
Jake Christie is a humor writer with credits at various websites. He can be reached at [email protected] or at www.JakeChristie.com.