Request denied
You may have noticed that I’m quite a fan of this social networking malarky. Well the virtual type anyway. (Given that my best friend and I managed a drink in February I’m clearly not so hot at the real life version.)
Despite the false friendliness of it all I do enjoy twitting and facebooking. Even if, of late, the main function of facebook for me is to compile endless lists of five things.
I don’t enjoy the “join this group to save children/whales/the planet and if you don’t you are horrid” aspect of it though. To begin with I had no problem with joining a couple of pages or applications for encouraging people to donate to saving something or other. But now my goup requests list is getting stupid. And properly fucking annoying.
Since the whole Haringay arse up I have been invited hundreds of effing times on facebook to join varying groups related to it. From the fairly tame “isn’t this sad” type to the “makes the Daily Mail look laid back; lets start disemboweling people” variety. One of my facebook friends (using friend in the very loosest sense here) invited me to join every group repeatedly for about a month.
Then there are the more general ones. Today I got a multiple repeat invite to a group called something like “against child abuse”. Clearly I’m against child abuse, equally though I’m against abusing people called Derek too, and yet oddly haven’t been invited to any groups along those lines.
It’s the same fecking people inviting me all the bloody time, so presumably they go through the invite function and find out which friends have and haven’t joined. Are they then assuming that since I haven’t joined any of the many many groups featuring people discussing the horrors of abuse that they’ve invited me to join that I’m pro? And of those that think advocating public hangings is normal, should I batten down the hatches lest they take my not joining groups to mean I’m a paediatrician?
If it was just internet randoms I’d just delete them, and I have done. But it’s not. Mostly it’s people I know in real life, some who’ve known me for quite some time. People who in my mind should know better. If not in terms of me thinking, “I thought X was quite a reasonable person not an over-reactionary nutjob”, but in how they know me. Or at least in how I feel they should know me.
I recognise that I am reading an awful lot into what is frankly just a bit of box ticking on their part, but it annoys me. I hate having a huge list of requests* so end up trawling through all the fucking things. It also annoys me that someone who actually has met me, who should have a pretty good idea about how I view the world can’t be arsed to consider if I, and presumably several other people on their friends list would actually want to recieve said request.
I know that I don’t share the same political and ideological outlooks as most of my real life friends and acquaintances; my best friend is Catholic, Tory and a former Army cadet/TA person who would be in the military if circumstances permitted (he’s also gay, and I find squaring that with his religious and political ideologies odd, but he has no problem so that’s fine by me). He’s also never invited me to some pointless facebook group that annoys me.
Either way I’ve got to suck it up and have a little rant to myself once a week (scheduled in amongst all the other rants), or change my facebook profile to read
” libertarian liberal atheist opposed to any kind of hanging, public or otherwise, and in fact any form of capital punishment. Also happy for people to shag and marry who the fuck they like as long as all parties are over the age of consent. Opposed to censorship as long as no actual death or similar takes place. Does not watch The Apprentice, has no interest in joining groups about someone in it. “
*It looks untidy, I can’t stand it. I’m not tremendously tidy in real life, but in the world of online profiles I get properly OCDish.
Tags: facebook, facebook groups, whinging
Mostly I avoid FaceArse groups, but if someone on my list – usually a local rather than a trusted Net friend – joins one of those hang’em’flog’em groups, I’ll find and join one anti- group just to provide a rejoinder. This makes absolutely no frogging difference to them at all, but it soothes my liberal middle-class long-haired do-gooder social worker conscience.
I always hit the ignore button. It’s incredibly handy. Sometimes I’m compelled to visit a group page to see what all the fuss is about. I was invited to join one called Get the Bulger Killers Off Facebook! or something similar, and so I went for a gander and was repulsed by some of the ignorant, simple-minded comments on it. These sort of groups seem to be full of holier-than-thou types, the ones who would just as quickly stick their fingers in their ears when they hear the noise of the bloke next door bashing his wife in the head. But I guess it’s ok to be vocal and ridiculously over-judgemental without knowing all the facts when you’re on Facebook.
Sorry, took the opportunity to have a rant of my own there!
By the way, if you set up a Facebook group against the abuse of people called Derek, I’ll happily join. I don’t know anybody called Derek, but I can be overly-judgemental about the people who abuse him (who presumably are most definitely scum and will never be able to pay society back for the pain they’ve put him through; let’s chase them with pitchforks, evilevilevil b*st*rds, because we have nowt else to do with our sad little lives)
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Gosh, PMT! Apologies!
Milly for PM!
You are so, so right. Admittedly, since most of my friends are now outside HW and in the cuddly-rainbow-coloured world of meeja, I have the good fortune to be able to give most of the reactionary twerps a wide berth and the feeling’s mutual. The thing that annoys the feck out of me is the applications, and my homepage feed being cluttered up by people I haven’t spoken to for 14 years. For all its flaws, at least Friends Reunited is casual, ie you can find out what old acquaintences are up to without having to make smalltalk with them or subscribe to daily updates on their life.
Good point about FR. Plus it does have the advantage that no-one else need know who you communicate with, whereas FB means unless you tweak privacy to infinity everyone on your friends list knows who else you’re friends with.