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A rant about how facebook robs people of the chance to "know" their friends.

I'm pissed I have Facebook.

Not because of the usual reasons of being in touch constantly, or the impinge on social freedoms by instant messaging. No, those all we know and bear.

It's about how I won't get to really know my friends.
It's crazy, I know. I already must know a lot about some of my friends, probably way more than I ever needed to know.
It's not about the information. It's about how you get it.

I didn't need to know my friend's childhood in a fact sheet, or her engagement in a picture. There could have been a conversation about it. The way we talked. The setting. A memory. A method.

I would have gotten to know my friend a little that day.
The way she sounded excited over the phone.
The way we walked and talked about it when we next met.
The calmness with which she told me about the divorce a couple of years down the line.
There's only so much emotion an exclamation mark can depict!

I might not remember a random status update, but I'd remember a chance encounter.

Facebook lets us know our friends, sure. But it robs us of the chance to really get to know them. To earn certain stories, to make our own memory of their experiences. There's a certain trust you have to earn before you're told by somebody about his mother's death anniversary. You don't get it in a single line on his timeline.
There's a tear filled phone call you have to sit through when your buddy tells you about his nth break up.

You have to remember your buddies' birthday, and not because you were reminded of it in a pop-up 3 times a day. No, you do it because hell hath no fury like a birthday forgotten.




There's 1200 friends in my friend list. There's some I like, some I don't.Yet I get tonnes of data from them my way every day, not all of which I want to process. But it still gets done.

Sure, we'll scroll right by with a lazy eye, yet we'd be so exhausted by the end of it.
So, instead of having a few close friends in my life, I have a lot of acquaintances.

The idea is to have their story inter-mingle with mine in it's own unique way. Somehow a notification in a window just doesn't reach out and touch my life.

It's sad, but there's nothing that can be done.

We'll continue to be robbed of stories and memories in this very way, right until we're done being a few GB sized data block on one of the 30,000 servers, a journey from "Born in <insert year>" right up to the end of our time line.

Hello, friend.

http://oldbustedhotness.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Facebook-Clock.png
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