Recently, Talk of the Nation did a segment about the dying newspaper industry during which the guest suggested that the industry's greatest weakness is its inability to understand that the internet is more than just a change in technology, but rather a change in philosophy. People who get their news online do not want to read a paper cover to cover, and anyone planning to produce the same product in a digital form is likely to fail.

NBC is facing a similar problem with its Olympic coverage. Years ago, ABC aired "Wide World of Sports" on Saturday afternoons. The show featured prerecorded sporting events, often days or weeks old. It didn't matter, though, because viewers often didn't know the results. For years, the Olympics have been covered the same way. When primetime rolled around, the network aired a series of edited segments recorded during the afternoon's play. People could stay blissfully unaware of the results because the newspaper wouldn't come out until the next morning and radio and TV stations often agreed not to reveal outcomes until after they aired.

Today, however, you can watch live streaming events on sites from other countries. Instead of being at the mercy of NBC, viewers who want to see the Swedish curling team take on Team Finland--which wouldn't get even a mention from Bob Costas, much less a clip--can watch every minute of play in either nation's native tongue. Because news doesn't wait until the morning paper is published, TV and radio can't pretend things didn't happen. Your drive home in the evening will be peppered with spoiler warnings from deejays and news readers, telling you to turn down the radio if you don't want to know who won gold in the Super-G.

Like the above examples, it's easy to think of Facebook like a big party with all of your friends. And all your friends invited all their friends. And all the friends' friends invited their friends and so on and so on.

In such a social setting, you might be engaged in a conversation with a friend, when one of their other friends jumped in to participate as well. In some cases, that friend might even be someone you know! For example, the only time I ever talk to Rhonda, one of my closest friends in 12th grade, is when I see her at the birthday parties of Ryno's kids.

In such a case, it would be perfectly acceptable to interrupt the flow of the conversation to interject a "long time no see" or "hey, what's up?!"

However, Facebook is not a party! It's a website. If you see someone who is a friend of a friend, you can send them a friend request. You can send them a message. You can poke them. You can do all of this out of sight of the rest of your Facebook friends without hijacking a stream of conversation.

The new technology represents more than just a faster way to do the same thing, so pull your head out of your ass.

Okay, we've already covered the fact that you don't need to sign your Facebook posts. "Hey, I might be interested. I'll put my name here just in case you have short term memory damage and forgot who was writing this over the course of reading two sentences and the photo of my to the left of those two sentences fails to trigger any recall."

The real lesson to be gleaned from this comment is not to ask questions you can easily figure out for yourself as it exposes you as lazy, stupid, or both.

Hmm, where could someone who is currently on the internet get more information about a 5K walk at the Phoenix Zoo? Ooo, that's a tough one. If only there was some kind of engine that allowed you to search for things. I bet if you invented that, you'd be like a billionaire or something!

Hey, crazy idea! How about before you go asking others to seek out information for you, you plug "5K walk at the Phoenix Zoo" into Google and see what comes up? My goodness, it's a link to this page. And another to this page. And a link to a PDF registration form! Hey, there's even an article about last year's 5K!

For fuck's sake, in two minutes I found enough information to qualify as an expert on the subject. How can you have 218 Facebook friends and not understand something as simple as Google?

Comedy is hard, and creating fresh comedic material is even harder. It's no surprise that many "funny" people get said reputation just by quoting lines of movies or old Simpsons episodes. In context, it's basically saying, "I'm not very funny, but I am familiar with things that are funny, and this particular instance reminds me of a funny thing that occurred in popular culture. Allow me to remind you of it with a simple turn of phrase."

A step below that level of comedy, however, is a lower plane. The out-of-context quote from popular culture.

Ha ha ha ha ha! OMFG u watch Sunny? I f'n love Sunny dude!

If someone did this in a conversation, you would suspect he was retarded or insane. But, in this case, this guy didn't just blurt out a non-sequitur in the midst of a conversation. No, he took the time to read the above comments, type out his response, click "Comment," and sit back to be proud of himself. "That reference to a four day old episode of a TV show that's popular, but admittedly is still on a cable station after prime time, will surely carry the day. My only regret is that people cannot 'like' my comment. I'm certain they will feel cheated not being able to heap accolades on my comedic stylings." Worse, while in a conversation, one might suddenly realize how stupid that comment was and have to spend several minutes apologizing and embarrassedly begging to take back the statement. This guy has had four days to click "Remove" and erase his idiocy, but hasn't!

Fuck, dude, you might as well have replied, "To get to the other side," or "Orange you glad I didn't say 'banana,'" for all the sense your comment makes. Even "Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis?" would have been wittier, and--trust me on this--"Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis?" is not witty by any measure.

Just a quick point of order.

Hey, Leon, see how your name and picture appear at the beginning of every goddamn thing you write anywhere on the entire fucking Facebook site? That's so people know who wrote it without you needing to sign it.

This past summer, my friend's wife had a new baby. For several months leading up to the birth, he would update his status to say something about how they'd gone to see the ultrasound or that the baby kicked or that he was going on family leave, and every time he did someone would make a comment along the lines of "Is [your wife] pregnant?" or "[Your wife] is pregnant?" or "[Your wife] is going to have a baby?" or "Baby wife pregnant your is going?"

What baffled me was how eager people on Facebook are to fly their ignorance flag. I have several Facebook friends on "ignore" status, so its entirely possible that if I pulled up their pages right now, I could find that they were going through some life altering experience. Were that the case, I might drop them an email. "Sorry to hear you got deported."

Furthermore, asking someone to confirm the news in their update not only shows your ignorance, but also your arrogance. What you are saying is "I could click on your name and read your last dozen or so status updates to figure out what the hell is going on, but it's easier to just make noise and expect a personal message telling me what's going on. That's how important I think I am in your life, even though you clearly aren't important enough in my life for me to bother reading a few one-sentence summaries of your day."

So it was that after his daughter was born, the same friend from the opening paragraph got a new job and announced he was moving. A few days before the official Facebook status announcement, several of his friends had gotten the news through emails and other channels and posted messages on his Facebook wall. Unless you were friends with both my friend and the person who posted, you wouldn't see them without going to his page, so I don't expect everyone to have read them, but it warrants mentioning only because if you clicked on his Facebook page at any time in the following three weeks, you would have nothing but a series of messages about where he was moving, why he was moving, when he was moving, and even how he was moving.

So... the day after the messages from friends came pouring in, he made the official announcement.

That was cut off because he exceeded the number of characters his phone was willing to send to Facebook or some such nonsense. Anyway, nice, succinct, answers all the easiest questions, right?

What do you think happens when he follows up with an article about his new employer less than six hours later?


Holy shit. Not only did he already tell everyone where he was going six hours ago, he also just posted a link about where he was going and explicitly repeated it. My daughter is in second grade and if she asked her teacher a question like this, she'd get put in the retarded class.

A week later, he's dealing with movers and shares his frustrations.



I like how he politely slipped in the answer there. It had been a week, so I guess he was willing to impart some info. Unfortunately, giving stupid people answers to questions they can easily find on their own with a minimal amount of effort is like feeding stray cats.

One of the worst things about Facebook is that it allows people to get a quick snippet of your life to see what is happening at the moment that you updates, and in getting this glimpse, these people feel intimately involved. Unfortunately, for most of these people, reading whatever your most recent update said is all the research they are willing to do. And when contradicting information has been included in previous updates, their attempt to look caring and intimately involved in your life is revealed to be nothing more than a meaningless ping to remind you that they exist.

Case in point:
A friend is visiting Disneyworld with his family. When they arrived on Monday, he commented on the weather.

The next day, a storm hit.


Two hours later, the rain finally stopped.


To this point, what's the one aspect of his trip that we are all well aware of? That the weather sucks. So, of course...

"Hope the weather's good. I really give a shit about you, your family, and your vacation, but not enough to bother reading back to what you said two hours earlier. Remember me when you're Christmas shopping!"

I think the thing I hate most about Facebook is realizing what idiots my friends have for friends. This discovery comes largely from the comments they leave on photos and status updates.

Really? A family sitting on a pile of blocks makes you miss the city where said blocks are located? Of all the things that you might miss about a former hometown, you've decided that it's your ability to have your picture taken in the park. Restaurants, neighbors, weather, former co-workers, fuck all that. The true measure of a town is whether you can pretend you're Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman while visiting a landmark that reminds you what city you are in.

Last night a kind soul on Facebook drew my attention to legislation that will have the people who run the post office in charge of our health care. We must not let this happen!

On Facebook, you can declare yourself a fan of anything you like. And since there are a bunch of other people who like stuff you like, you can band together and form groups to let everyone in the world know how much you all like the stuff you like.

Unfortunately, there's no editorial oversight of what groups exist and are being created. So if you decide you're a huge fan of Hugh Laurie and you absolutely need everyone to know, you could go form a Hugh Laurie page without noticing there are already several others.

Of course, in the above case, there's no real harm. If you want to run your own Hugh Laurie group--perhaps you feel the Hugh Laurie Fans group doesn't address your particular love of his work on Black Adder and the "I Pretty Much Love Hugh Laurie" group is too clique-ish and the "Hugh Laurie (House) is the freakin Man!!!!" group completely disregards your Bertie Wooster meets Dr. House fanfic--that's your prerogative.

No, the harm comes when you decide the thing you like is so important to you and so perfectly defines you as a person that you have to join every friggin' group tangentially related to whatever it is you like. Then, as your friend, I log on and check my News Feed only to have it positively choked with announcements that you joined "Its possible that I would give my life to do Hugh Laurie," "Gene Wilder looks kind of like Hugh Laurie," "hugh laurie is the hottest oldie in the world," "Je suis Fan du Sosie du Docteur House !!! ( Hugh Laurie)," "Hugh Laurie is such a BAMF!" and "Hugh Laurie is a total BAMF!"

As a result, I like you a lot less and seriously consider removing you as a friend. You cease to be a real person to me and instead become a caricature. You're just a one-dimensional Hugh Laurie fan with nothing else to offer the world but a blind adherence to everything we've come to expect of the stereotypical Hugh Laurie fan. There is nothing unique about you and you do nothing to dispel the idea that I can write off you and all the other Hugh Laurie fans in the world as being nothing but a bunch of cookie cutters.

I have one gay acquaintance who epitomizes this for me. Every time I log onto Facebook, I am given a list of all the new groups he has joined. Boycott Carmark Cinemas and Boycott All Carmark Cinemas. Revoke Prop 8, Protest Against Prop 8, Repeal Prop 8, and Prop 8 Should Be Revoked. Then to top it off, he's also recently become a fan of Madonna, Cirque du Soleil, San Francisco, "Will & Grace," Margaret Cho, Liza Minelli, "Queer as Folk," Angel from Rent, Barbara Streisand, "Ab Fab"... ugh! Enough already! We get the point! You're gay and you like all the stereotypical things stereotypical gays like! Why not just become a fan of "man ass" and stop being so coy?!?

In fact, at this point, I kind of doubt he really is gay. Think about it this way. If he was a football player or a wrestler or in the army and his Facebook account was being updated daily with announcements that he was now a fan of "Naked Chicks" and "Monster Trucks" and "Totally Not Being Gay" and he joined groups like "I don't like the way those gay dudes look at me" and "Get teh GAYZ out of Disneyland!" and "Preserve Marriage - Yes on Prop 8!", you'd suspect he was compensating for something. So his insistence on reminding everyone who knows him every day that he is here, he is queer, and we'd better get used to it makes me suspect he's really into chicks and is just embarrassed to tell everyone who have come to expect homosexuality from him.

In truth, his gay pride is a big part of what is making anti-gay legislation like shooting fish in a barrel for the religious right. Just as Barack Obama has moved the civil rights struggle to a new level, gays have to understand that the very tactics they used to bring gay rights to the national spotlight are now being used to rob them of those rights and failure to change strategy will only result in more defeats and more rights lost. Later this week, I'll lay out the new gay rights strategy I hope to see adopted because the one in place isn't working.

Over the weekend I signed up to volunteer at BarackObama.com and created a profile page. At first, I was impressed with how much information you can find at the page, especially about local events and defenses against the Republican smears. But as soon as I created my profile, I noticed the points tally on my page. Every time I joined a group or invited some friends to sign up, I earned points that moved me up the rankings.

This could not be good.

Sure enough, today I started getting a flood of friend requests from people like this douche who obviously just auto-friends everyone and joins every group as it's created. According to the site, only 17 other people are more supportive of Barack Obama's candidacy than Rafat Farooqui.

I wonder if Michelle Obama is one of them.

Another annoying trend is the masses of people who start their names with exclamation points because it will get them listed first by the alphabetical ordering. I really look forward to Obama's Election Day acceptance speech where he acknowledges that he couldn't have done it without "! ! ! A A Big Dick 69" filling ten thousand people's inboxes with unwanted friend requests.

Seriously? Is our political process so inane that our next president's website is basically Friendster but not quite as emo?