Monday through Friday on Facebook, once a day, I upload a song for the sake of playing 'mister DJ' and sharing music I enjoy that others may or may not have heard. It's called Chas Music Picks. Recently I was made aware of a song called “My Mom's on Facebook.” I checked it out and laughed my ass off.
It's so true.
Facebook, that viral webpage that surpassed MySpace as THE King of Social Networks, brings us all one step closer to a bright and shining future where we'll find ourselves having to update our statuses on how dinner is while we're having it.
DAD: Can you please pass the salt?
SON: Dude, why don't you get it yourself?
DAD: Why I outta...
MOM: Henry!
DAUGHTER: Why must we always fight?
JOHN: Dinner time again?
DAUGHTER: Yeah, my folks...
SON: Stay out of this!
DAD: Who is John? And why is he commenting?
MOM: Henry, don't make me de-friend you!
DAD: John just tagged in a picture of a horse's ass! Cindy!
I'm sure that in the Sixties when they envisioned a future where all the kids were in separate locations and with the push of a button -viola!- all parties were notified to come to the dinner table the “Like” option was just a formality. But as families grew apart and we all became dysfunctional and fed drugs and pharmaceuticals there had to be something to tie us all together. To unite us. To give us the space we need to stream our mass boredom from isolationism and yet to keep us tethered to the rest of the world. Facebook has filled that need.
Case in point: my mom. Outside of driving my dad, sister, and youngest brother to their jobs she cleans the house. And cooks. And has nothing else to do. Enter the electronic world of Facebook. She befriends me. Then, begins commenting on what my friends say about me and even adds one or two of them to her friends list. She keeps tabs on what I'm doing, what I write, what I say, what I link to, what I upload, so on and so forth. It's the nightmare of some Eighties “after school” special where the mom or dad finds the diary/journal of their kid and combs through their life piece-by-piece because of their power of household. Only now it's not private. It's publicized.
And I find myself caught between generations: the generation older than me warned of computers taking over, the loss of freedom and privacy, the thought that we would cease to be individuals and instead become numbers (“they're giving you a number, and takin' away your name”) meanwhile the generation after me has none of those fears because all those rights -privacy, individuality, freedom- have already been taken away from them. You need your Social for this, you get a job by knowing such-and-such person, fill out this form, and make sure you have nothing less than perfect credit.
I may be digressing here but my question is: where is this all going? While I'm not going to automatically sign-up for conspiracy theories or world orders it does call for some concern. With people actually being fired for their FB statuses or divorcing because they're hooking-up with someone else, really... does this train come to an end? And if so, what?
My second concern is that FB is an electronic “tether” that parents think they have on their kids that replaces talking with them. It always changes. When I was in my teens it was parents giving their kids pagers so they would know when to call home. That gave way to cellphones. Then to MySpace pages. Now the 'rents can logon and watch the YouTube clip of whatever their kid is doing.
Back to my mom. There seems to be that instant “gotta know everything” once someone, especially your mom, becomes your friend. The only good thing about it is that it's a passing phase -my mom stopped caring what I put up on FB within about a month. Others may not be as lucky. The thing to keep in mind when using FB, or the Internet period, is watch what you say. Even if you exclude your mom or dad from reading it that doesn't mean someone else won't tell them or even show them what you put on there. Plus, it IS considered publication and therefore saved to some computer somewhere to be possibly recalled at sometime (paranoid now?)
More and more I use FB mainly for chatting and business purposes. Since I've “hidden” all the Farmville/Mafia Wars/Cafe World crudola, people really aren't saying much at all.
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