I didn't join myspace when all the craze was going on for quite some time because....well I like to stay out of the craze! Finally I decided to join when my best friend who lives back home in ND got pregnant. Yeah, I caved in for the pictures :) Well, I did the same thing with Facebook, but caved again because I really missed the connection to all my friends back in ND. Ok, that is what these sites are supposed to be for in my mind. Its a great way to catch up with friends who so often live far away in our increasingly mobile and distancing society.
So what are they not supposed to be for? Drama! Why does this happen? I have talked with classmates about the ways that facebook comes up in therapy and it is astounding to me. It has made our society collectively passive aggressive! If you don't like someone, in my mind you have 2 choices; 1) don't have them be a part of your life or 2) talk it through and figure out how to either fix it or make a compromise. Now though, we have option 3) post a "cleverly" disguised hate comment on your facebook status in an attempt at being "sneaky" (please note the sarcasm!) and attempt to start a war of statuses!!!
I don't get it! These are adults doing this, not just teenagers. I know you all know of someone who made a fake profile to stalk an ex, or posts these annoyingly vague yet blatent status messages as a childish dig, or posts pictures with the sole purpose of pissing someone off.
What are your thoughts on this? It really saddens me because this is obviously affecting our society. I don't want future generations to think this is ok, what will that mean for the future of interpersonal conflict resolution and relationships in general? Cant we go back to the days of hand written letters and corded phones that the whole family shares? How do us facebookers who really just want to keep in contact with friends, shield ourselves from the "other side" of facebook?
3 comments:
Sorry I have no answer to your question. I don't have Facebook or MySpace because I just choose to avoid the drama.
Is it possible our society is evolving backwards? Maybe in the future we will never mature mentally past the age of 13. :)
Ha! Sounds like a good plan though Mel, avoiding the drama and forcing my friends to just email pics of their babies.
I still have faith though that we will collectively evolve past 13...it scares me too much to believe otherwise!!
I have really enjoyed facebook and have connected with people that I would otherwise have long ago lost. I think overall my life is better for it but if I have that kind of drama going on among my friends I don't recognize the digs and such. I do see a lot of political debate and trashing of general but not personal things (like climate change, health care, etc) and I won't get into that with ANYONE on FB because it does get really childish. Still I don't consider that personal so that is different. I had 1 guy I went to grad school make a totally rude snarky comment about my hair color (of all things) and I deleted the comment within minutes of him posting it. He is also guilty of the most obnoxious political BS I have seen so all of his posts are hidden in my news feed (out of sight out of mind, right) and I have made it so he can not see my status or wall. Why not un-friend him you might ask? I considered it but really I think that would produce more drama than my solution and I doubt he has even noticed that he can't see my posts b/c FB is awesome about privacy so if he were to visit my profile he might just think I have not been posting rather than something obvious like 'you are blocked b/c Dana thinks you are a loud-mouthed jackass'. Anyway, my suggestion is to use these things to filter out the drama. Maybe you already use them but most people don't. You can also hide all that farmville and what kind of wine are you BS! Sorry for rambling!
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