I Disapprove of This Post

A few days ago I read a thing called “The 7 Most Annoying Status Updates on Facebook” or some such shite and, against my better judgement, I started to read it.  I only got through a couple, and the one I remember, at which point I stopped reading the article, was the “My Life is Better Than Yours” status update.  Well, this covers everything from bragging about your kids’ soccer team to showing awesome vacation photos to pictures of your garden to recipes to basically just about everything.  What the hell are people supposed to post about, their failures?  (Actually, I’m guessing that was probably further down in the article.)

Anyway, everybody should post whatever they like on facebook and not worry too much about what other people think, but, since I’ve titled this post “I Disapprove of This Post” I’m going to go ahead and talk about a couple of status updates that really irritate me.

First, “In two words, what would you say about….”  Two words is not enough to say anything about anything.  When I started writing this blog, I set my minimum and maximum.  Minimum word count, 250, because I am doing this largely as a writing exercise and less than 250 is a copout.  Maximum, 500, because longer than that and people are going to get sick of reading it.

The other is “Share if you love your mother/brother/best friend,” etc… or “Share if you hate cancer” (as if there are a lot of people out there who just love cancer) or “Share if you would like to end domestic violence or whatever.”

No, I am not going to share and I am not going to feel guilty about it either.  If everybody shared, facebook would get godawful tiresome awfully quick.  It’s  like the pre-facebook bumper stickers that said “Honk if you blah, blah, blah”  If everybody actually responded to everybody else’s bumper stickers, driving would be even more annoying than it is, and maybe a little dangerous, too.

So, yeah, for a lot of people, facebook is the new version of bumper stickers, or t-shirts, just a place for one slogan after another and, as much as it irritates me, that’s fine.  Post whatever you like.

Just don’t expect me to share.  Or comment.  Or like.