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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Facebook Junkies


Hello. My name is John and I am a Facebook junkie. I started out just as simply as everybody else does; a friend told me I needed to create a Facebook page, so I created one. I spent a while picking out the perfect picture of myself to show the world what I look like (a picture I use as my profile picture for this blog as well) in not too gory detail. A picture where I wouldn't look too fat or too old. I filled out my information. Gender: Male; Religion: Atheist; Political Views: blank. Then I filled out my likes and interests: The Oakland Athletics, Cars, Technology, Music, Literature, Graduating, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. After that I filled out a list of my favorite TV shows; they're too numerous to mention, but suffice it to say that some of them are pretty lame and are only listed for their train wreck value.

The story gets a little more interesting when one day I found out that I was a 'fan' of every single thing I listed in my likes and interests. There's a page for nearly everything, even what I listed under the my favorite books section (I read a lot of classics). How the hell can 'I read a lot of classics' even be a page anyway? I've noticed that I am a fan of America's Next Top Model, The Biggest Loser, and Jersey Shore - all huge train wrecks. Can anybody hold that against me? I don't think so. Besides, I didn't intend that to be the basis of me joining a facebook fansite for the shit. Facebook has severely invaded my info page to sign me up for things. So if you have dumb things written in your likes and interests, be warned that this can happen. This revelation has happened rather recently. My days as a facebook junkie started long ago.

I started playing Mafia Wars about two years ago and I really haven't missed one single day of playing it. It is one of the slew of games that facebook employs to keep bored users online longer. Among the most notably terrible games are farmville, farmtown, yoville, treasure isle, vampire wars, cafe world, and petville. I do not play anything except Mafia Wars in which I am currently on level 459. I have not purchased any points or anything to help me skip levels and/or level up faster. I am simply incredibly dedicated to one insanely dumb game. For those of you who don't know what Mafia Wars is, please don't ever play it. Most of you won't get sucked in instantly like I was to dumb button pushing for the sake of pushing buttons, but it may come to run your lives like it has mine. The game consists of nefarious activities like beating up bookies, fighting rival gang members, and, of course, killing people. Mafia Wars lets all its players down right there by not being as graphic as other games; all there is to see is the text 'job complete' when you've performed an illegal activity. Somehow there is a slight satisfaction when text pops up letting you know that you 'iced' your opponent or bribed a judge. There really is no substance behind the game. It is an indefensible addiction, what I consider the best kind. If anyone could talk to you out of your addiction or you could properly defend yourself from an attack, then it would be less worthy of being called an addiction. And furthermore, if your addiction doesn't at some point find you in your underwear in front of a computer screen at 3 in the morning, it may not be a real addiction. Sure, drug addicts don't ever have this problem unless they shop on canadianpharmacy.com, but their version of satisfaction seeking can almost be justified in an argument. My addiction to Mafia Wars reminds me of someone else's addiction to anything lame that they can't give up for absolutely no reason. It's like a collection of meaningless trinkets from vacation spots that mean precisely nothing but still have to be collected all the same.

I have just revealed one of my biggest sources of shame. Other people have meaningful hobbies, I revel in my own futility. I have one saving grace, however: I do not shamelessly leave annoying and intentionally incomplete status updates in order to drum up attention for myself. The Facebook friends I have that perform this sad ritual are soon booted off my list for the abhorrent act. Most of them transpire like this. SUSAN JACOBY oh no. DAN FELMER oh no what? SALLY DAVIS are you okay? DAVID JACOBY what's up susan? Are you all right? SUSAN JACOBY I just found out that Ricky Martin is gay. Many people are bamboozled into believing something of meaning just happened and it could have been horrible. It's usually very banal and boring to find out the true cause.

What are these people trying to pull? Do they need to startle everyone into paying attention or is there just some gross misunderstanding? I think these people are just the right mix of selfish and uncreative to fail at coming up with something that garners proper interest. But these people are not the worst offenders of unwritten Facebook etiquette, there is another far worse specimen that makes my blood boil: the overtly religious poster.

These people come in all shapes and sizes and use Facebook as their personal forum to capitalize pronouns and nouns relating to the divine. They usually use it in reference to something wholly unrelated like, "The Raiders win! Praise Him!" I'm like, uhh the Raiders are a group of people... oh wait. And although it might smack of divine intervention for the Raiders to win a game, does every trivial human happening have to involve god? If there's one thing Facebook helps prove, its that god, if he existed, would have far greater things to do than waste time like the rest of us idiots.

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