Thursday, February 19, 2009
Facebook displaying
I find it extremely interesting how people choose to tell everyone on facebook about their daily routine and just trivial things normally you would never bring up because of awkwardness. So many of my friends have done the little note "25 things about me" where so many people could read about your inside jokes and what you like to do, but no one seems to mind. Also if anyone reads this and has done one of these I'd like to know maybe why u did?
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2 comments:
I did one, and I'm tempted to just chalk it up to conceit, but there's a little more to it than that.
The person who tagged me with the "25 things" meme did an amazing job with it. All the facts she posted about herself were unique, intriguing and completely new to me. I still haven't read a better one. After I finished reading, I really wanted to try and be as honest and creative with mine as she was in hers.
So, part of it was that I wanted to be creative and appear interesting. The rest really was conceit. The meme is essentially an invitation to be self-centered without coming off as narcissistic. In a spoken conversation, if you just volunteer all this minutiae about yourself, you risk boring people with stuff they don't care about. Online, they have the option of ignoring it or skipping it as they please.
In general, I think peer pressure played a big hand in getting the trend to spread. Some of the friends I tagged wrote responses to the effect of "Aw, now I have to do this." I didn't mean for it to be a project, but the expectation of reciprocity is so ingrained in facebook's social structure that people would rather just post 25 inconsequential details about themselves to look like a good friend rather than ignore the invitation. Ironically, you risk appearing self centered by NOT talking about yourself.
I agree with many of Sarcasmancer's comments-- in particular with the motivation of why participate in the 25 random facts in the first place.
I was invited by 9 people before participating in the 25 random facts. I finally "gave in" to the hype because the person who tagged me had many interesting things about her that I was intrigued by. Her facts were thought through well that I felt embarrassed if I didn't tag back.
I don't believe it's conceit, but I do find it funny how many people are able to read these quirks about the individual and comment freely about it.
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