Derailed Thoughts

Not As Big a Proposal As Eating Babies.

July 20th, 2008

In Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” a solution is presented to world hunger. He suggests that since much of the population dies young, and as overpopulation is a growing problem in the world, babies should be used as a source of food. Babies like the larger one pictured to the right could easily feed a family for days.

I have a much smaller proposal to make. It’s very unrelated. So unrelated, in fact, that you might correctly infer that I just wanted to use a crazy title to see if people would read this.

Facebook provides us with a great place to keep in touch with friends wherever they may wander in the world, and it has become the worst addiction that I currently entertain. Every page on Facebook has been carefully engineered to quickly catch you up on friends’ lives: The home page gives us a quick update on the lives of our acquaintences (a somewhat cold update from time to time–”John Erickson is now single” with a little broken heart next to it); friends’ pages are continuously updated with all of their activities on facebook, facilitating easy stalking with the click of a button; status updates allow us to see, if not our friends’ actual emotional or locational status, the latest brain fart that resulted from it. All of this is great fun.

There is one way, however, that I think facebook has gone a step or two too far. I realized this the other day as I was looking through a friend’s page and noticed a wall post that interested me. To find out the background on the post, I clicked “Wall-to-Wall” and read the past conversation. Since the conversation was sparse and went back for more than a year in just a few lines, I quickly learned some facts that I didn’t know; though they weren’t dark enough to be hidden from the public domain, these were things of the past that I’m sure this person wouldn’t have liked brought up. As you are reading this, it will be more fun for you to pretend I was on your page, and that I just read some set of desperate or angry wall posts that you wrote back in the day and forgot about (until now when I mention them). Those are the ones. I read them. Spooky.

How many times have you clicked on the Wall-to-Wall button? It looks pretty innocent, just sitting there underneath a wall post. I think you’ll agree with me, though, that 50 percent of the time, you end up feeling a bit creepy after reading through a conversation you were never a part of.

At the very least, we need to all keep in mind the fact that others’ conversations, although they may strangely choose to post them out in public, are still somehow private. I think any one of us would be weirded out to have some random acquaintence from a class three years ago reading through a set of posts to a recent ex (or maybe having a recent ex reading through conversations to an attractive acquaintence we just remembered from class three years ago, also weird).

Therefore, I propose that Facebook change the Wall-to-Wall button to the “Rudely Eavesdrop” button. While functionality will remain, we will be at least reminded that we are being creepy before we make the mistake of reading through others’ notes.

A much better idea than eating babies, I’d say.