Am I the only person left alive who’s not on Facebook? I know I’m not, but I sometimes feel as if I am.
You see, I’m too good for Facebook. It’s beneath me. Honestly, it is. It sounds like something I’d say in jest, but my tongue is nowhere near my cheek as I write this.
If there’s one site out there that I think is massively overrated, it’s Facebook.
Facebook trivialises human relationships and reduces them to single sentence status soundbites. It’s a place of congregation for the bored, the unimaginative and the irretrievably nosy. What counts as a friend in the patois of Facebook disparages the very concept whose name it so blithely employs. I suppose the word acquaintances just doesn’t have the same ring in a product manager’s ears.
So, it was with some amusement that I received an e-mail from a headhunter at Facebook, looking to recruit me to work there. I wouldn’t be the first ex-Googler to make the leap; far from it, in fact.
The days when I’d work for a company whose product I didn’t believe in are many years behind me now, so it’s an offer I won’t be pursuing. It was amusing to be approached for this particular firm, however, because I actually get very few job offers these days. Of all the firms that could have approached me, there can’t be many less likely candidates.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit to having a deactivated Facebook account. I created the account some time ago with the specific purpose of reading something written by a relative. When I logged in and discovered that I would first have to formally ask that person to be my friend, I lost interest and immediately deactivated my account. After all, we were already friends.
Now, by now, some of you are probably thinking, ‘Jesus, this idiot just doesn’t get it.’ To you, I pose the following question: Think of all the people you had lost touch with during the course of your life and have now rediscovered, thanks to Facebook. Why do you think you lost touch with them in the first place?
Ponder that for a while as you update your status message with the details of your latest bowel movement and the kind of mood it has left you in.
Of course, I ask the above as someone with almost no friends in the real world, so draw your own conclusions.