Another thing that bothers me on facebook, that clutters up my page, is the personality quizzes. You know the ones, which criminal mastermind are you, which Enterprise crew member are you, which of the Seven Dwarves are you, which European city should you live in, what is your natural profession, and so on.
Let me speak for you
I did one or two when I was new to facebook. (Among Harry Potter characters, I am apparently Luna Lovegood. The one who was, even at Hogwarts, the weird kid in school) But, I soon grew bored with the concept. They take the answers you give to questions, and spit out a pre-prepared response, like a fortune cookie. Tarot, Palmistry, or even a crystal ball will probably tell you more, at least they are more up close and personal.
But I am not arguing in favor of those, either. (disclaimer: I read Tarot cards all the time, that’s my party trick, but it’s not a science. The value in it is that it’s a springboard, a place for the conversation to start, a way to look at reality from a different, randomly chosen starting point and maybe you’ll get a fresh take on the situation)
What I am trying to say is that you are the one who knows your own personality, you are the one who’s been living with it your whole life, and you don’t need a quiz to tell you whether you are Happy or Grumpy. If you don’t know, then you must be the 8th dwarf, Crazy, the delusional paranoid schizophrenic one. Ho-Hi, Ho-Hi, I’m such a crazy guy.
Then, today, I saw one that I was tempted to take. The concept was a little bit scary. It was “What would your facebook status update be if you were a chatbot.”
I am a bit curious about how much facebook actually knows about my personality. I get hit with lots of ads for “Meet Single Russian Women” which shows that they might know my preferences better than they know my marital status. Lots of weight loss ads, too, which is a sign they know what they’re doing.
Also, I thought “Wow, this might actually be a future trend. If facebook can actually generate status updates in the user’s voice, some people undoubtedly will just start using it, generating a status update every hour or so which actually sounds like them, communicating by proxy, reducing interpersonal communication by yet another step. It’s like the Turing Test in reverse, where the question is not ‘at what point do computers become indistinguishable from human beings’ but rather ‘at what point do human beings become indistinguishable from robots.’
It’s not that, fortunately. Mine was “My blog tonight is I hate this crap 50 cent sucks between these concrete walls of gray” and I realized they were just grabbing random phrases from previous updates, which are generally either my poems or plugs for my blog. They didn’t even worry about correct grammar, so they weren’t seriously trying to copy my style.
The day is coming, though.
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