Facebook Friends

2011.03.23 / Japan / posted by idrawgood

Facebook. Maybe it'll look better if I type it in caps and make it bold: FACEBOOK.

It's our favorite contradiction. It is one of the most useful tools at our fingertips and at the same time, the most colossal waste of time imaginable. However we see it, it's a big part of our lives, and how each of us uses it is pretty different.

I've taken a special liking to examining the online personalities that emerge when friends use the tool, which may or may not be a reflection of the real person in front of the keyboard.

The Unnecessary Update Friend

I like to use FB to keep up with pals, especially since I live far from many of them, but there are some things that I just don't need to read. Facebook needs a 'worthless bullshit' filter for these posts. The unnecessary update friend will slam you with hourly posts on her day, regardless of the mundanity. To be honest, I don't care if your cat threw up, if you think you're healthy because you ate plain Cheerios instead of the honey nut kind, or if you're just 'sitting at work. bored.' Give me a f*cking break.

The Self-help Friend

Mr. or Mrs. Self-help spends hours scouring the intertubes for inspirational pearls of wisdom cooked up by notable philosophers like Voltaire, Jack Johnson, and Grover from Sesame Street. Their goal is to find common ground with as many FB users as possible through flimsy clichés so they don't feel as alone while eating their Stouffer's microwave dinner under the naked light bulb in their studio apartment.



The Stalker Friend

Everyone knows one. The FB stalker is the IRL equivalent of a guy who goes onto public transportation wearing a trenchcoat in July—you know he's got something to hide. You know the stalker has a FB account, but he hasn't updated his status for 3.5 months and counting. Instead, he'd prefer to sit in his basement and oggle photos of his ex-girlfriend before writing her letters he'll never send. When the stalker chooses to make a virtual appearance, it'll be in the form of a strange email or text containing information that he could have only known after closely following your status updates for months. Instead of a two-way social network, Facebook is reduced to a peeping hole.

The Party Friend

The party friend will go to any length to prove her life is at least, like, 15 times better than yours. She clogs your newsfeed with a slew of very similarly posed photos from Saturday's bar golf extravaganza while captioning, "it wass ever better then last years!!!1". If she manages to break away from her incredibly, like, a-mazing life for long enough to create a coherent status update, it will usually be about how much she loves her life … to the point of making you feel like shit because you don't love your own life quite as much. Note: occasional moments of lucidity may actually yield sad, lonely posts from the party friend, but those will quickly be updated with supposed revelations about how she had forgotten how awesome things are.

The Critic Friend

The critic friend lets FB content wash over him like a golden shower. He really thinks FB is a vacuous wasteland (redundancy included for effect), and yet he spends hours a day scraping its content to make a sarcastic comment or prove someone wrong with web sources that are just as shady as the one he's trying to refute. The critic asserts himself as an intellectual superior by posting quotes from existentialist novels or talking about how he has better things to do than blow time on FB.

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