~Robin Williams as Patch Adams, Patch Adams
~Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, Justified
You know. I'm not all that concerned anymore if you don't like me and I'm not talking about the Facebook liking, I'm talking about what liking used to mean.
Nowadays liking something is just a button you click on Facebook and much like everything else in the modern social-network-saturated times the meaning of the word has changed.
Take the word friend for example. The word friend doesn't mean what it used to mean. Now it just means someone you share cat photos with on Facebook. I would wager 40% of the people who see your posts on Facebook are people you have never met or probably never will meet. We accept people as friends and send out request to them so we can be friends as a way to network our businesses or interests. Nothing wrong with that. It's just the use of the word friend that is misleading.
I certainly never ever want to be someone's friend on Facebook because of some sense obligation. We shouldn't fall into the trap of 'Well we work together so we should be friends on Facebook.'
Why?
We never talk and when we do its awkward, like we've bumped into each other at a cocktail party after discovering one of us slept with the other's wife or husband or daughter or son or mother.
Today we invite friends to like our pages.
We used to invite friends over for pizza and a movie.
and that's 'Jody' with a 'y'
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I tend to refer to the people on Facebook as "connections" (unless they really are friends). Mark Zuckerberg may not like that, but he's not my friend, so I couldn't care less... :)
ReplyDeleteI'm always confused when someone posts something that is a bad thing -- "My dog died!" -- and everyone "likes" it. What does that mean? Did they want the dog dead? Did they help kill the dog? Do they "like" the fact that the grieving former dog-owner is miserable? I'd rather they replace the "like" button with a set of buttons - "Agree" or "Disagree" (for political crap) - "Congratulations" (for good stuff) - "Thanks" (for helpful stuff) - "Sorry" (for bad stuff) - "LOL" (for funny stuff) - "Applause" (for music/videos/etc) - and "Huh?" (for pretentious garbage).
ReplyDeleteSay what you like, but I will be forever grateful to Facebook for reconnecting me with some of the people who have blessed my life over the years. I would have made a bad pioneer-- the "load your life up into a covered wagon and travel for months until you reach a remote destination at which you will remain cut off from all former friends and family for the rest of your life and never know what became of them" routine is for the birds. I'm all about the happy endings.
ReplyDelete