What He Would Hate

Dear Holden,

This is something you would really hate about the world... Facebook. Facebook is a website where you can post pictures, videos, and all types of things about your life. You can also update your status to reflect what you are doing, or how you are feeling at that moment. You can also communicate with friends by posting on their “wall” which is basically like their home page. The reason that you would hate Facebook is, although it sounds like an excellent idea for communicating with friends, it is incredibly phony. Most of the time, the statuses never reflect the actual emotions or mood of the person posting it. The pictures are also elaborately cropped and set-up to unsure that the person posting it looks as good as possible, even if they look nothing like it. When you see that someone posted on another person’s wall, it is generally also very phony, and is often posted only to show their other “friends” that they are cool or popular. That is another thing that is very phony about the site; friends. You can find, contact, and add your friends so that they can view your wall and pictures and communicate with you. However, the idea of a “friend” on Facebook goes far beyond the idea that a friend is “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection,” as defined by the Apple Dashboard Dictionary. On Facebook, people add other people that they barely know or have never had any real relationship or conversation with. They do this because your “friends” can see how many other friends that you have. It becomes a competition to see who can have more friends on the site, whether they know the person or not. As you can, the site is extremely phony, and yet millions of users log on every day to check their “fiend” count, post perfect pictures of themselves, or post their statuses to make others feel inferior. This, I believe, is something you would hate about the world I live in today.