I like Facebook. Despite the neoconservative Big Brother aspirations of its pube-faced creator, it's about the only way I get any communication out of certain people back home. It's also a useful way of perving on girls you once knew spending valuable time at work when bored. The status updates part of facebook is one of its best features, and I’ve had numerous actually-pleasant occasions when checking the internet and finding out about a friend’s engagement or marriage or death or whatever. The perfect example of the correct use of the status update can be seen in this (real) example I saw from one friend:
**** is wondering how to tell everyone that **** is pregnant.
Wonderful, and made me incredibly annoyed to know that I would never be able to come up with such a cool way of announcing a pregnancy or indeed anything else.
However, recently, it seems like whenever I have turned to Facebook, I have been greeted with numerous updates from one (in particular) of my contacts that always go something like this (and these are actual examples):
****is on a tiny island 50 miles of the coast of Fiji. Hammock outside, my own beach...this is the life!!!!
Or like this frequently repeated gem:
****is getting back on that jet plane...
So, number one. Firstly, and most obviously, the fact that I was not on an island in the Pacific when I read this, but was sitting, damp, in a freezing cold school, hands bleeding from trying to stop rabid children from biting each other, yet strangely bored to the point of repeating poking myself in the eyes for something to do, after rushing through typhoon rains to get the chance to do all this on time, made me moderately furious. Secondly, (and possibly, no, certainly more annoyingly), if I was on a tiny island 50 miles off the coast of Fiji with hammock and my own beach, the last thing on my mind would be to pick up my mobile phone (which I certainly would never have brought to a tiny island in the first place), and tell fucking Facebook all about it.
After taking out my annoyance on some innocents for an hour or two, I calmed down and realised I should feel a little sorry for the person involved. If the best thing he can come up with to entertain himself on a Pacific island is to connect to Facebook and mobblog about it, then he deserves all the breaks he (annoyingly) seems to be getting. That, or he needs to be humanely put-down for failing to come up with anything better to do.
Maybe it’s only me, but I just find the language in the second example plain offensive. I have actually been finding it hard not to write out my own Facebook message response along the lines of:
Olly hopes that jet plane falls out of the fucking sky as wonderfully apt punishment for calling it that jet plane.
I mean, who actually says that? I'm getting back on that jet plane. He probably snorts an ovine grunt of pleasure after saying it too, like a over confident swaggering prick that’s never been told to shut the fuck up. He might as well just tattoo C.*.*.T on his forehead and be done with it. I think that when writing this, he probably sees himself as a cross between Rick at the end of Casablanca, and the slightly-disturbing-in-an-incest-sort-of-way Star Wars poster with Leia clinging to Luke's leg; he's got to get back on that jet plane. Perhaps I am taking it a little too seriously, but the whole nature of Facebook status updates is to announce personal news to people, (possibly why mine normally involve buying video games or being annoyed), and if possible, things that people would want to hear, so to use phrases like “that jet plane” and “I got smashed”, (and various other updates all about a job that involves rugby of all things – a sport that for some reason my mind inextricably links to a: Pedophilia, b: French-revolution era bourgeoisie and c: lager) really goes against the whole idea of the status message and leaves no option but for “friendship” deletion. That, or the realization that maybe I don’t like facebook so much after all...
Nb. Actually, while writing this, I thought I better check my own facebook status update history to make sure that I was living up to my usual levels of hypocrisy, and of the 16 updates that are still stored, about 3 could be accused of this same crime – as long as you consider “Olly is in Beijing” to be as bad as “****is on a tiny island blah blah blah”, which I don’t - But my apologies to anyone I have made as annoyed as I have been – please feel free to unfriendify me. Also I have no idea of the intentions of the person who wrote these status updates...they could have been done in an "ironic" style...but I doubt it.
