Facebook: where souls go to die

I recently saw graffiti written on a train that said “80% of the internet is pornography.” While I don’t normally give much credence to random statistics scrawled on the sides of fast moving freight trains, I have to say this one struck me as fairly accurate. I would even go as far as characterizing the remaining 20% as being comprised of cat pictures, celebrity gossip and social networking sites appealing to the emotional retard in all of us.

Yeah, I said it. Retard.

Facebook is a place for puerile rumor mongering and passive-aggressive pronouncements made from the safety of your profile page. For all the talk about connecting to people around the world, social utilities really only serve to foster the increasing sense of isolation and narcissism already rampant among humanity.

Am I the only person who thinks every update is a provocation aimed directly at me? And isn’t it uncomfortable when two people have an argument wall-to-wall? It's like watching a couple have a vigorous spat in public, while you remain en guard for the unfortunate moment when violence is initiated and you will be forced to step in.

Except on Facebook there is no threat of physical violence, just the utterance of some brutal truth that will make the assailed hang their head in shame for the next few days, until the slight is pushed off the front page by a lot of other pointless bullshit.

When being privy to endless status updates and application after ridiculous application (dedicated to the most banal hypothetical questions and childish favorites' lists, detailing your boring interests) what you’re really seeing is an edited version of that person. Nothing substantial is communicated. Nothing of merit is shared, just a cleaned up version of a person free of common flaws and idiosyncrasies that tend to be the most interesting facets of one's personality.

It was recently revealed by The Business Insider that health insurers have been paying people on Facebook in virtual currency to oppose health care reform. This virtual scratch is typically used in bullshit time-wasting games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. If you're not familiar with these I'll spare you the gory details. If you are a player of either, get off my blog, seriously. And don't come back ever.

The truth is the people participating in this scam have absolutely no idea what their doing. They don't give two shits about health care reform, they probably don't even know enough to oppose it. Frighteningly enough, what these mammoth insurance companies are doing is legal. So this cluster fuck of terminal ignorance and chicanery should be a huge story, right?

Wrong. The big story regarding Facebook this week was the further alteration of their security rules, because apparently your gam-gams and peepaw in Idaho can't figure out how to keep their personal details off their profile page. Because that's what really matters.