Title: Who the bleep cares about "Friends" on FaceBook? By: Selma Carvalho Source: Goan Voice UK Daily Newsletter 16 January 2011 at http://www.goanvoice.org.uk/ I loathe FaceBook. Oh, I'm a member of course and from time to time, I open up the FaceBook page to catch up and spy on my "Friends" but truth be told, I hate this modern invention called FaceBook. Thanks to Facebook I have been brought face to face with my past. My college past of more than twenty odd years ago is now staring at me again. Campus boys who in the heady flush of youth, looked almost James Dean-like on their Bullet Enfield bikes back then, have aged miserably over the years. Their expanding bellies couldn't mount a well-fed Arabian horse much less a bike. Why on earth would anyone want to be confronted with the reality of how their lives panned out? The past is something you put in a secret vault and carry the key in a cameo locket worn around your neck. It is that idyllic paradise of youth forever eulogised as the perfect time in your life. I just want to remember them as Lord Bryonesque - mad, bad, dangerous and inhaling the odd puff of hashish smoke (or so they boasted to whoever cared to listen). To have that memory shattered is a terrible crime against humanity. Then there's the vulture from Offices Past who has come back to pick on my carcass present. The one that I never really liked in my office; who I called the Evil One, who mysteriously misplaced that important file of mine, told my boss it was my fault and sold me into brown slavery for a petty promotion. This creature suddenly jumps out from the shadows of Facebook and reclaims me as a "Friend" and remembers with nostalgia all the collegial conversations I never had with her. In a minute I'll tell you who is going to top the list of favourite "Friend" to hate but before that there is the "My life is perfect Friend". She has the biggest house, the shiniest car, the most loving husband, the gorgeous family, vacations snorkelling in Israel and parties where she flits like a Monarch butterfly; all of which she feels compelled to share with me and the world. Monastic monks show less devotion in prayer than she does in parading her bliss of plastic smiles. And I, the work-in-progress wife and mother with my annual vacations to my parent's house, hate this creature churned by God in the milk of perfection. And the top slot goes to the minor celebrity "Friend." At first you can't believe its happening. Some minor celebrity - a writer, artist or musician - deigns to accept you as a "Friend" on Facebook. You are humbled to be welcomed into the private world of these luminous celestial beings of the sky. Pretty soon, you are bombarded with details of their every waking moment; what they eat, how they cook it, who they are in love with, who they have fallen out of love with and political views so pedestrian they need a footpath all of their own. You begin to look at them as mortals not the glorified beings, plebeian dwarfs like me want to put on pedestals. Now, we can now never raise them to the mysterious status of a Greta Garbo or embellish their lives with documentaries after their deaths. No, of course we can't, because we knew then on FaceBook or Twitter, and to be honest they were terribly boring, prosaic, dull people. Why did they have to disillusion me with the mundanity of their lives? Ah FaceBook!! That celebration of all things mediocre of the 21st century.
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