Facebook is Irritating Me

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I swear, Facebook is so irritating sometimes. I know, I know, if I don’t like it, I should just get rid of it, but I guess the good outweighs the bad….on most days. In the last two days though it has just irritated me enough to remove a “friend” and remove myself from a “group”. First of all, I am a business owner, a blogger, and I belong to a lot of charities so in actuality a lot of my “friends” on Facebook I have never met in public. I accept friend requests (sometimes) from people I do not know personally based on their friends and groups we have in common. This is especially true of “blogger” friends because we support each other. We become friends because we have been on the same trips, met the same PR people, we support each others posts. It is all on the up and up. Or so I thought until yesterday.

The day before yesterday someone requested me as a friend. She was a blogger and we had many friends in common, so I accepted. The next day she wrote on her wall that her “Facebook experiment worked”. Whoa nellie! On her wall she indicated her experiment was to find out how many people would accept her friend request if they didn’t know her in person. Ok, that actually would have been a pretty cool experiment had she not requested FRIENDS of FRIENDS…especially bloggers. It actually would be interesting and eye opening to see how many people accepted your friend request if you had no one or nothing in common. We might even be able to learn a lesson about it and show our kids just how dangerous accepting friends on Facebook without knowing them is!  But instead, she chose to use bloggers of all people! We always befriend each other! Especially in my group of bloggers. There are hundreds of us. We learn from each other, we teach each other and we support each other. We don’t use each other as experiments…Uh..bye bye “friend”.

And then, last week or so, maybe a little longer, someone added me to a group for the town I grew up in. It was pretty cool to see all the memories come flooding back. Remember Skateway? Remember the bowling alley? And then…it started getting MEAN. In these “groups” people join all the time, so they may not see what was posted yesterday or even an hour ago….I mean, most people don’t spend all day on Facebook. All of the sudden people started lashing out “If I see one more post on skateway I am leaving!” Seriously? LIGHTEN UP. It is Facebook. FACEBOOK. I think Facebook gives people something to hide behind. Like, they would not be that rude or cruel if you were standing in front of them. Let me put this in a different way.

You plan to meet up with 10 people from your old town.  Three of you show up. Susie starts talking about her memories of Skateway. It’s all good. Then Joey shows up ten minutes later. He has no clue what you talked about and he doesn’t ask what he should and should not mention and so he starts talking about Skateway…he has different memories than you do, so the conversation shifts even though the subject  is the same. 20 minutes later Tina and Marie show up. Same thing. They start talking about Skateway and how cool it was when they were teenagers. Would you seriously look them in the eye and say “Shut up about Skateway already! I will walk away from this entire meetup if one more person talks about Skateway! We already talked about it! Sorry you weren’t here, but I don’t want to hear about it again!” You probably wouldn’t because, in the grand scheme of things…it is NO BIG DEAL! You also probably have manners. And actually, it should be kind of funny that so many people share the same memories. But Facebook allows you to step behind those manners and say whatever the heck you feel.

Not all groups are like this. I am in quite a few that are just as pleasant and fun to be in. But quite frankly, I have way more important things going on in my life to be used as a guinea pig in an experiment or have people complain about good memories. Seriously.

 

 

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