Invasion of the Facebookers
Picture a bored Mark Zuckerberg idling away at his desk in his cushy Harvard dorm room (DISCLAIMER: I might very well be wrong about that; Harvard may have roach-infested dorms) in a state of abject depression that half his university’s student body didn’t know each other. Why?, bemoaned Mark. Then, suddenly, a lightbulb flashed above his head. Bells sounded in his ears. His eyes lit up. The whole world is on the internet. Why not create a usernet portal which Harvard students can use to network and socialize with each other? And thus, on February 15, 2004, (pardon the cliched sentence structure, lifted straight from a corny history textbook) Facebook came to be.
But honestly, did you expect a Harvard student to keep his flash of brilliance within the four walls of his campus? Of course not. Travel a few weeks ahead and voila!, Facebook has appeared on 45 other American college campuses. Travel many months ahead, and a Facebook account has come within the reach of all high-schoolers (who were secretly jealous of their elder collegiate siblings…sshh, don’t tell anyone!).
But enough with the history lesson (albeit one which is slightly more interesting than what’s in the corny textbook). What IS Facebook? To cut a long story short, Facebook is still what it was originally intended to be, an online networking portal – with a few extra (and fun!!!) frills. What can you do with Facebook? (is it just me, or do you think this is beginning to sound like Facebook’s non-existant FAQ section) The more appropriate question would be – what CAN’T you do with Facebook?
You can unleash the inner graffiti-spraying vandal in you by writing anything and everything on your friends’ ‘walls’. You can discover the stalker in you which you were totally unaware of by following your friends’ conversations (wall-to-walls, in FB speak) to a point where you know more about their lives than their parents. You can rediscover the kid in you by adding, and subsequently playing, the game applications (if you have a FB account and haven’t yet discovered the awesomeness that is the Crazy Taxi Game, you deserve to die). You could also take all those pointless, brainless, time-consuming but extremely interesting quizzes which you find on the ‘Quizzes’ application (Which European Country Are You?, anyone?).
Sounds boring? I’m not surprised. Unless you’ve been bitten by the FB bug yourself, it always sounds boring when you listen to someone else gush on and on and on (and on and on and on…) about the merits of FB. Oh my god, what the hell do they see in this? is a common first reaction. Then, curiosity gets the better of you. You type out www.facebook.com in a rather unwilling yet morbidly curious manner into your Firefox address bar (does anyone even use IE any more?). You create an account. You add friends. You add applications. You talk to your friends. You use your applications. It’s so pointless, rather drab and repetitive, and extremely…unoriginal. But at the same time, it’s so. damn. addicting. Everytime you get on your computer, you find yourself unconciously typing out f-a-c-e into your browser and before you realize the heinous crime you’ve committed, you’re on FB (and will probably remain there for the next hour, at the very least).
Anyway, got to go now. I’ve just been Superpoked.
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