Get out of my Facebook

I am not what the marketeers would term an “early adopter”. I still struggle to send text messages successfully and have to get someone else to stick songs onto my ipod because I am too much of a Luddite to upload or download or whatever the hell it is. But Facebook, I can do. And if I can, anyone can.

At first it was fun. Then it wasn’t.

As you will doubtless know by now, joining Facebook involves submitting yourself to constant surveillance by the following forms of sub-life:
- The social retard from your school days whose leftfield offer of friendship you agreed to accept in a fleeting moment of “I wonder how much of a cock they’ve turned into” curiosity. You know, the moronic bell-end who cannot get enough of all the tedious extra Facebook applications and seems to think it the highest form of wit to simultaneously bitch-slap you, poke you with a goat and rate your mum’s shagability. Every day.
- Sinister marketing companies who expressly create the aforementioned tedious Facebook applications in order to harvest your personal details for the purposes of strangulated death by creepily targeted spam.
- Employers who want to vet the bitch-slapping, goat-poking side of your life that you artfully left off your CV.
- And – most insidious of all – ex-girlfiends. Sorry that was a Freudian typo. Ex-girlfriends.

Accepting friendship on Facebook gives people a panoptical window on your life – to see how many friends you’ve got compared to them, who those friends are, and what fascinating activity everyone is doing at any given minute. Random “status update” examples? “Natasha is never drinking absinthe again. Urgh!” “Matt is excited about going skiing to New Zealand tomorrow!” “Dan is surfing the net for pictures of Luba when he should be writing his GQ column.” See, it’s endless F.U.N.

And then recently it all went a bit wrong when a girl I used to love but ouch-that-ended-painfully sent me a friendship invitation. Presented with the tantalising option to lift the lid on this Pandora’s inbox, the voyeuristic itch proved irresistible: “Confirm”. Soon I found myself enslaved to a compelling up-to-the-minute news feed of her new life complete with sickeningly saccharine pictures of her and the bloke she dumped me for. Who is now her husband I couldn’t help but notice.

Like a P-plate pile-up or Australian Idol, her profile was hard to look at, but even harder not to look at. Facebook doesn’t yet treat me to an automated update each time hubby enters Pandora’s box, although I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before this application is created.

Before all this online social networking malarkey was foisted upon us (i.e. pre-2005) we could leave skeletons in the closet without fear that they might one day come back to life and start challenging us to games of Scrabulous and showing us umpteen pictures of themselves striking pretentious catalogue poses and getting riotously pissed.

Facebook reopens closure. It rips the scab off old wounds by innocently popping up with a “friend request” message, torturing you with mental angst about whether to “confirm”, “ignore”, “send message” or “launch the effing laptop out the effing window”.

Yes, we all know that the likes of Facebook and MySpace serve a very useful purpose in facilitating easy communication in a time-poor world. (Just when you thought interaction couldn’t get more superficial than texting, along comes the frankly hateful and offensively lazy Facebook ‘poke’.) More importantly, it is genuinely fascinating to play a competitive game of one-upmanship with one’s schoolmates without ever having to go to the trouble of attending the ten-year reunion – who’s got married, kids, bald, fat… or all four in the case of Natasha. (She should definitely give up the Absinthe.) But for those of us who are masochistically curious, who cannot help but check out how much fun our exes are having without us, Facebook has robbed us of one of the pleasures of a technologically simpler life: blissful ignorance.

Discovering that the woman I once wanted to marry was now married to my replacement came as a rude shock – a shock that shook me from my escalating addiction and forced me to prune back my Facebook garden into something more manageable and less full of thorns and ex-girlfriends hiding under rocks.

Facebook, if used properly, tells you in one quick glance what your friends are doing, whose birthday you’re about to miss, who’s a champion Scrabulous player and so on. But at what point does documenting every detail of your life leave you no time to actually live it? It’s like people who spend their entire holiday looking through their digital camera viewfinder.

So recently I have given my profile an overdue Facial, cleansed and squeezed out the desperate dickheads (get out of my Facebook!) who were taking up too much of my time demanding I buy them back a virtual Jågerbomb and map my personality through movies. I’ve limited my friends to those who are in my phone book and have rediscovered that yes, Facebook is a rather efficient way of staying in touch.

I did make one exception. Just so at least I still get to poke my ex once in a while.