Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post has made a name for himself as an outspoken Facebook critic, and he’s finally got some data to back up that hatred. Using youropenbook.org, Weingarten put together some of Facebook’s most banal status updates.
It’s a stark look at what people are willing to share, but let’s not forget just how many people are on Facebook. To say that the updates are different than a typical conversation you could potentially have over the course of a week seems like a stretch to me. Do I want to hear about my neighbor’s pimple? No. But that person likely wasn’t sharing the thought for me. Would a couple of my college buddies share that same information with me unsolicited if we were sitting in the same room? Absolutely.
It seems like Weingarten really takes issue with an observed lack of propriety/formality on Facebook, or really the internet in general. He talks about the ubiquitous “LOL” this way:
Facebook users may be bored, but, paradoxically, they also are easily amused. We know this, because they are always laughing out loud. LOLs occur with such frequency they are literally impossible to count: Dozens arrive every second. A subset of those laughers are simultaneously rolling on the floor — but still in numbers too large to tally. It is only with a third winnowing — those both rolling and laughing their behinds off — that the numbers become manageable: 390 per day.
It’s a funny interpretation, but LOL is the internet chuckle, something I think Weingarten could stand to do a little more often.
