Facebook Instant Messaging — Thinking Comes Later

It's Complicated.

Facebook is a highly addictive, life sucking website – it simulates an actual friendship without all the rigors of talking, getting dressed, or bathing. I can glance at my profile right now and see that I have 421 friends – I’m proud of this, proud enough to put it on my resume, proud enough to mention it when I meet new people, proud enough to threaten to call in my army of friends when I receive sub-par service in a restaurant. Without the Internet, I would not have 421 disciples of my incredible coolness, because in face to face contact, other people usually find me overbearing and egocentric, while I find them to be a pitiful waste of my highly valuable time. My Facebook profile, however, puts a friendly cover on my unsightly natural demeanor, not unlike the human costume that Satan recently used to win the Pennsylvania primary.

If you’re a user of Facebook and, let’s be honest, since you’re on the Internet right now you probably are, you’re no doubt acquainted with the website’s newest feature: Facebook Instant Messaging. People spend days perfecting their Jetman scores or rearranging their top friends; I know people whose pages are so cluttered with downloadable addons that I can’t even find their Wall beyond all the gifts and icons and quizzes that offer to tell me which presidential assassin I am (I hear Lee Harvey Oswald was quite the prolific blogger). To this already highly time consuming endeavor they have now added instant messaging, which in and of itself sucked away just about every one of my afternoons between sixth and tenth grade. So, to recap, the Internet has taken one highly addictive thing and combined it with another highly addictive thing, which is all fun and games until John Belushi dies. What’s next? Wikipedia combined with porn? World of Vicodincraft?

Facebook started out as a social networking site that was pretty cool, but the addition of instant messaging was the final step in its evolution into a full blown Mother Simulator. Some time ago, Facebook added the “Status” feature, where you could enter what you were up to and how you were feeling, which would then be displayed alongside your name. After that came the News Feed, which updates you on all of your friends’ doings on Facebook in a single concise page, sort of like a political news brief, only it includes pictures of Condoleeza Rice’s crazy weekend in Vatican City with her homegurlz. Now, with the message feature, I can glance at a single webpage and see how my friends are feeling and what they’ve been up to recently, and without changing windows bring up their name and, should they be online, shoot them a message in regards to my impromptu background check. “Hey, Bill, your status says you’re totally bummed out right now. You doing okay, honey? You want some milk and cookies?”

Sure, I could’ve done this anyway with AIM, but now that it’s so much more convenient I can hardly resist the temptation to tell Cybil that I really enjoyed the pictures of her playing Guitar Hero drunk in her underwear. Facebook is already a breeding ground for rumors and gossip – we should expect no less of a website where millions of “friends” receive constant updates about one another’s relationships, political affiliations, and sexual dalliances – but now we can instantaneously postulate about whether It’s Complicated* specifies handjobs or just under-the-shirt groping.

*Periodically, when one of my friends changes his or her relationship status from It’s Complicated to something else, my news feed will tell me, “_____ is no longer in a complicated relationship.” Either my friend in question is incredibly lucky or Facebook is incredibly wrong, because I can’t think of a single human relationship, romantic or otherwise, that isn’t in some way complicated.

Don’t take this to mean that I think gossip is a bad thing – on the contrary, Facebook gossip is just about the only thing keeping us talking in real life anymore. Watching Ethel and Lavernius go from Single to In An Open Relationship to In A Relationship to Single in the course of two days or seeing a pictorial journal of Skyler’s gradual descent into alcoholism is bueno conversation fodder; the problem is that now we don’t have to leave the warm glow of our computers to have these conversations anymore. Before, we were forced into one another’s personal space to talk about these things, because the time delay in corresponding via one another’s walls was too long to keep up with the blistering pace of our highly dramatic lifestyle. Now, every Facebook user is, in his or her own way, God. We can look down at the world via our News Feed and be aware of everything that’s happening, and now, without so much as opening another program, we can whisper to all the other observant Gods about it.

Now of course, all the voyeurism and debauchery of Facebook can only be matched on a godly scale by the figures of Greek mythology, who were on the whole about as happy and well adjusted as any given character on The Sopranos. Zeus, for example, was In A Relationship with his sister Hera, who got so jealous after he spent the night playing naked Guitar Hero with mortal hottie Io that Zeus was forced to turn Io into a cow to protect her from his vengeful wife/sister. Everybody else in the Mount Olympus network got a huge kick out of this, especially when Io changed her status to “Io is a cow.”

Truman Capps hates it when people make overblown historical allusions simply to prove that they are experts in a given field, and would like to point out that the only reason he knows the story of Zeus and Io is because his mother told it to him at an early age, which served to simultaneously educate him in the evils of adultery, incest, and turning people into barnyard animals.