Mounting Paranoia: Facebook. Scary. No, really.
October 6, 2009 3 Comments
I brag from time to time about the fact that I have never, not even once, taken a Facebook quiz. I don’t like giving information away for free, for one thing*, and I take the attitude that anyone who doesn’t already know which Muppet they are leads an insufficiently examined life.
I did, however, try the Statistics application which mathematically collates the words in all your status updates. My (cheery, devastatingly witty) output yielded up an uncomfortable little sentence in—of all things—haiku. The first line of one, anyway.
And now, as I stumble around the Internet searching for information about something totally unrelated, I find the Firefox Screengrab tool (of which I’ve rapidly become overfond, but that’s a story for another time) and this:
If Facebook turns into a tool for introspection or reveals any kind of truth about emotional states, we will have reached the End Times. That’s all I have to say about that.
In the meantime, I will avoid ovens.
*(luckily blogging pays well.)
Carla Fran
millicent
Millicent and Carla Fran
I am re-reading DFW’s essay on television, and he makes that distinction early on of how hard it is to appear relaxed in front of a camera; what we take as confidence and lack of self-consciousness is really a full on attack of supreme self-consciousness. And Facebook is this times wazoo, so perhaps (hopefully?)any study of our happiness from it could only be the happiness we hope to promote to our friends and enemies. Which, like in middle school, usually correlates to your overall happiness. Fuck.
How do I screengrab?
Download the Firefox Screengrab tool here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146
Then you right click on any webpage and you can grab the whole thing or a selection and save it as an image. It is marvy.