Edit: OK, what the hell?! In the week *directly* following my blog post, three major news sources (Washington Post, NY Times, and Time Magazine) all write articles covering this topic (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502252.html?nav=rss_email/components, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/25-random-tips-for-the-busy-facebook-user/?hp, and http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html, respectively). Did I win by posting first? Or has this meme finally achieved mass acclaim that it’s now newsworthy for laypeople?
Right, this was one of the topics I said I’d write about, plus it’s the one that gets me the most incensed (not to mention I can write it with great passion and it’s relevant to most people). So now I can cross off one of the items on my to-do list of post writing! Yay!
…onto the real topic. “X Things About Me” on Facebook, where X is some integer someone has randomly decided to torment the online community with, usually either 16 or 25. Let me start by giving a little background: back in the days of MySpace, people had this uncanny ability to post “bulletins” filled with the most useless, stupid information no one would ever care to know. And the peculiar thing is this, my friend: these bulletins all instructed everyone who read them to “OMG TAKE OUT MY ANSWERS AND REPOST THIS BULLETIN WITH YOUR OWN FILLED IN LOL!!!!1″. Yes, I said “answers”, not “things”, because, see, apparently (and I agree wholeheartedly with this) MySpace users are too back-asswards to even know what to write about themselves, so all these bulletins were in reality parasitic surveys with questions like “drink? laid-back or neat-freak? favorite book to read when it’s raining? OMG rly??? what do you liek to wear @ parties wit ur friends?” and their ilk. I kid you not; I’ve seen queries like these, queries not only incomprehensible the majority of the populace above 18 but also for which their answers DON’T MATTER ONE BIT. Yes, that’s right, NO ONE CARES ABOUT THE ANSWERS TO YOUR BULLETIN SURVEY ON MYSPACE.
But I digress. Like most terrible things on the Internet (see: /b/), cancer like this cannot simply remain content polluting one website, it has to muck up others, too. And so some moronic dolt decided one day to bring this shit over to Facebook, titling it “16 Random Facts About Me”. This time, at least the user’s are smart enough to actually write things about themselves instead of filling in pointless questions like a lemming. The biggest problem, though, that I have with this variant on the normal chain-letter (because, honestly, let’s admit it–that’s really all that this is) is what’s posted at the top of every single one of them:
Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.
Let’s disect that a tad: first, these notes have the gall to blatantly say “Rules”, like this some sort of game or exercise in which we’re required to partake, and if we don’t follow the rules–*GASP* you MUST follow the rules! Secondly (and here is, again, the biggest problem I have with these–if it were not for this I probably wouldn’t mind this as much), you need to choose 25 people to be tagged, and also tag the person who tagged you. Seems reasonable, ri–wait, what? Tag the person who tagged me? So, let me get this straight: if we’re tagged, we have to make a note ourselves, and tag the person who tagged us? Doesn’t that mean they’re tagged in a note, so now they have to make a note and tag us back? Does anyone see what I see? Can someone recognize the infinite loop that would invariably result in this sequence of steps? For those of you who like pretty pictures, I’ve taken the liberty of making a diagram of this situation in Microsoft Word 2007 using “SmartArt” (I wonder if I can get paid for that bit of advertising…):
After the first round of going through, the second step adds "...because he has to according to THE RULES".
So eventually, two people will get locked into a “tag-post-retag” loop…and then two more people, with one of them probably being one of the first two…and the horrendous cycle continues until the entierty of Facebook is consumed by this cancer. DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM? Now, some people may say “oh, c’mon, we have common sense, we won’t endlessly do that”–but NO! I guarantee you out there exists SOME people stupid enough to do that. And even for those who don’t, you’re simply perpetuating further USELESS trivia no one wants nor needs. And it ESPECIALLY bugs me when people tag me in these notes. I will personally assure you right now that, if you tag me in one of these notes, I will not only NOT post a note in return and tag you, but instead comment upon your stupidity. Seriously, if people out there on Facebook need to read others’ “X Things About Me” notes to learn about someone, that suggests a large problem with social interaction today. It’s my belief that if people are actually good friends, they should already be able to know things about each other simply by being around each other, and don’t need to be told what someone is like. Figure it out for yourself or stop being friends with someone who needs to promote themselves through blasting out personal facts to all of their “friends” on a social networking site.
TL;DR: “X Things About Me” is cancer spread from MySpace that is inane, makes no sense, and causes infinite loops.
