We all know the story of Facebook.
A couple of Harvard students spearheaded by Mark Zuckerberg took a revolutionary idea about merging social interaction with the Internet from a dorm room to Silicon Valley, from a few Ivy League schools to a few hundred million users and from an initial investment of $500,000 to a current value of $75 to $100 million.
If statistics don’t resonate with you, maybe hyperbole will: Facebook is fucking huge. If the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” Facebook is bigger than religion.
Since its creation, the website went from the brainchild of a young genius to a mindless dump for the narcissistic, the insecure and, put frankly, the agitating. A quick glance at your newsfeed offers a more mind-numbing look into other peoples’ lives than an entire season of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”
The social network is plagued with idiocy from a collection of very different, yet equally annoying, users. The best comparison is zombie movies. Each features a different type of zombie: fast, slow or mutated into such crazy shit they must be based on a video game (hello, “Resident Evil”). When they finally catch up to you it doesn’t matter which kind they are; your flesh is still going to be gnawed at in a vicious and animalistic manner.
The first type, narcissistic, has one redeeming quality in that she’s usually an attractive teenage or 20-something-year-old girl. The bad thing is she knows it, and flaunts it in the form of photo after photo after photo.
This is the girl in the kitchen with her girlfriends and a camera while you’re playing beer pong with your friends and being a productive piece of the party and society. This is also the girl who uploads her photos — probably to an album named something stupid like “young wild and free” or “party girls <3” — on Saturday and Sunday mornings before you’ve even had a chance to consume greasy food and Advil to alleviate the pains of last night.
She’ll have easily more than 1,000 photos and will likely become one of those overbearing mothers on “Toddlers & Tiaras.”
Picture Girl’s polar opposite is the Facebook depressant. This is the guy or girl who’s deeply depressed and wants you to know it. They’ll post a vague complaint like, “Wow. I didn’t think things could get worse …” and when you ask them what’s wrong they’ll reply, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
If you don’t want to talk about it, why are you posting about it? These people are contradictory and counterproductive. They’ll talk about their problems all day without ever fixing them. The best way to handle these people is to ignore them or strip their Internet access so they might go out into the world and find a new boyfriend and girlfriend instead of wallowing over their last one.
Finally, there’s the over-poster. This person will tell you every detail of his or her day, no matter how minute. These four or five posts per day will include pertinent news from “Just ate frozen yogurt… yum” to “lol my dog is so cute.” Each worthless nugget of information about an entirely average day is so important the person must share it. This person also has Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Google Plus and parents who want them out of the house.
With too many friends, these people are unavoidable. The key to making Facebook a place where you can breathe and not want to toss your laptop off Jesse Hall is mass deletion. Forget the flings of middle school and the targets of small talk in high-school algebra and ruthlessly cut these people out of your life. Only then can Zuckerberg’s creation restore its brilliance.