The Enabler

For our first topic, I would like to talk about something which I find curiously fascinating. I shall introduce this by posing to you a riddle:

What serves as a porthole into your life, allows you to spy on your enemies and friends alike, can endanger your job, and turns adults into fourteen year old girls in under thirteen seconds?



The answer is, of course, MySpace.



Yes, you, MySpace. And Facebook, you're not blameless here, either! You two and others like you who masquerade under the title of "Social Networking," are more accurate called "Enablers," because you are enablers...for stupidity.

Consider: millions of people maintain accounts on MySpace and Facebook (many of these users have accounts on both) in order to stay in touch with friends, to meet new people, to post embarassing or over-the-top photos of themselves, or to whine about their individual melodramas to an anonymous audience. Many of these users are teenagers, who may be excused for their dramatic episodes and fits of caprice because they are teenagers. Many more of these users though, are adults, who should know better.

At the surface, the mere fact that both MySpace and Facebook serve, essentially, as dossiers on people makes it all too easy to spy and be spied upon. Our banks and credit card companies are quick to caution us on safeguarding our private financial information. But I am far more worried about my ex-girlfriends trying to find me on any of these sites. Compared to a jealous ex, identity theft doesn't seem quite so bad....

Being an adult is about many things, and one of these things (or so I'm told) is being "responsible." Responsible, of course, can mean many different things to many different people, but overall, I believe the general concensus would agree that people who present themselves sloppily, promiscuously, scandalously, or in some infantile fashion, are not being responsible. If you want to be taken seriously, don't put publish pictures of yourself half-naked and three-quarters drunk doing a keg-stand on Canal Street at Mardi Gras while a crowd of strangers encourages your foolishness by cheering, chanting, and hoping that you pass out so that they can take even more embarassing pictures of you for everyone (including people in Djibouti and most parts of Nepal) to see. You will, by Monday morning, have lost your cushy job in banking or advertising or portable toilet sales (despite the photo of you demonstrating the uses of such a product).

The reasons for this are manifold, but foremost among them is that nobody will take you seriously after seeing you do something that ridiculous. Secondly, the rest of us just don't care. I'm a busy man, as I'm sure many others are. I have so little time to keep track of my friends and family and current events in the first place that I don't want to waste any precious seconds looking at you proving your foolishness, even if I don't know you. If I am unfortunate enough to know you, you can bet I will have lost all respect for you.

As if this was not enough, Face/Space (as I shall call it) is, essentially, a forum for dramatic stupidity. There are, walking among us in disguise as normal humans, people who believe that their lives should be lived as a bad telenovela. If they are not embroiled in some scandal of their own devising, they are not living aggressively enough. How often have you heard about one person getting into an argument with another person over a message on Facebook, or because someone took someone else off of their Top Friend List, or even simply because someone didn't accept a friend request? I'm certain that you have.

So certain am I that you have, that I wish to pose a question to you: When did we, as a people, reach the point where the most important thing we have to worry about daily is why we were moved from #3 to #4 on a list of friends? At what point does a grown adult devolve into a teenage girl? Not only that, but at what point does a grown adult, who should be handling grown adult problems such as taxes, bills, and what happened on Grey's Anatomy last week, invite teenage girl problems for him/her-self? Let's demonstrate just a small grasp of realism here and ask ourselves who cares.

The answer is no one. No one cares. No one cares because it's not important. Real people don't rank their friends in the first place. Real people don't And while I'm on the subject of real people--real people don't have 763,482 friends. The average size for a real person's social group is seven people. Honestly, sit down, open up, and crack open a big can of reality cola.

Moreover, let's all grow up.