Fun With Facebook

I started visiting Facebook frequently earlier this year because social media moved from a back burner to a front one in my job, and I needed to understand the communication options it offered.

Like others, I reconnected with school friends and family members. I knew better than to try to friend my 18-year-old nephew, even though I'm dying to see what he puts on his page. (Or not...yeah, probably not.)

I even suffered for awhile from Facebook envy - you know, where everyone else's life looks so much better than your own that you want to either jump off a bridge or start staging pictures of yourself in gorgeous locations, surrounded by people who look like they adore you and find you absolutely hilarious (and who, by the way, are not nearly as attractive as you are).

But I'm over that, and now I revel in the unintended humor and the inadvertent hiccups from people's posts. Like the dad with his 8-year-old daughter sitting on his lap who titled the photo "Date Night." Or my colleague's young son who didn't know the full meaning of his observation when he wrote, "Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, write on walls, and get poked by people you don't know." Or the guy who congratulated a female pal on the new fellow in her life after seeing she'd posted a different profile picture, and she said, "What? That's my friend Emily!" (Note to Emily: I might have made the same mistake. Except that the necklace and earrings tipped me off.)

And don't even get me started on the uproar that occurred when a few fastballs were thrown at us with the "new Facebook," and oh, the torture: we all had to LEARN something else about how to post on a FREE service. If we could have harnessed that indignation and energy, we could have changed the world. In a week. 

Still, it's good to know that this platform is there to immortalize pictures of our drinks and appetizers; count the days down to our vacations; increase the audience for YouTube videos of salsa-dancing dogs; and help us publicly humiliate ourselves, because lord knows we weren't doing a good enough job on our own. Ah, Facebook. Can't live with ya, can't kill ya.