Think.

It’s hard to imagine my life without Facebook.  When I step outside myself and think what my life would be like without it, I come to a loss.  I can’t imagine my life without it.  It’s like an adopted child: you end up getting very attached to it.  My Facebook page is a part of me.  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t go on Facebook.  Now I can access it on my phone so I’m on it even more.  But what happens when you continually subject yourself to look at and read about hundreds of other peoples’ lives on a social network?  What happens to you as a person?  Those who are like me know what I’m talking about.  But, in case you don’t know, let me spell it out for you.  Basically, you kind of start to hate the human race with every status and instragram picture that pops up on your Newsfeed.  We aren’t meant to read about a thousand peoples’ lives every day.  Nobody cares about what you ate for breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner or how you’re getting white girl wasted tonight with your girls.  But, yet, whenever we get a friend request, 9 times out of 10, we add the person, even if we don’t know them.  Why?  It’s an ego thing.  The more friends we have on Facebook, the better…right?

Wrong.  Continual browsing through Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr leads to hate, gossip, lack of privacy, and, most of all, secretly stalking random people we find attractive or hate.  So now we are led up to my main point of the evening.  What do you do when you stumble upon a friend of a friend on Facebook that you think is cute/hot?  You usually request them, right?  What do you do if some random acquaintance of the opposite sex that you go to school with or brushed shoulders with at a party requests you?  You usually add them.  So now you don’t have “Friends”, you have a bunch of “People I’ve Seen”.  Now here is where it gets really good.  You have these girls or guys as friends on Facebook and you might occasionally creep their pages, check out their pictures, maybe like a status or a picture here and there.  You rarely get the courage to IM them one night because, well, that’s weird, right?  But then what happens when you see these girls or guys in person one day at a party, prom, the mall, or a friend’s house?  What the fuck do you do?! 

“Hey, you look familiar, I think I’m friends with you on Facebook.”

Awk City.  Sick introduction bro.  But what else can you do?  It’s awkward as fuck because you both know that you’re friends on Facebook and you both know that you go back and forth liking each others pictures but now you’re too scared to make conversation because there’s been this virtual, non-verbal flirting going on through the Internet the whole time!  It screws up your whole game.

But this is the 21st century.  This is the world we live in.  I was just thinking the other day about how easy it is to get a girl’s number and talk to her.  When my Dad was my age he had to meet a girl in person, ask for her number in person, call her house phone, go through her parents first and then speak to her and possibly go on a date if he got lucky.  Now what do we do?  We briefly talk to people in real life or see attractive people on Facebook, IM or message them, talk for a little, get their number through a computer, text them for as long as we like without going through parents, and hang out with them the next weekend.  Easier than bagging groceries.  It sucks because I do this all the time.  I can’t help it, it’s the life that I live in.  Everybody is so accessible through Facebook; it’s too convenient.  But with convenience comes lack of uniqueness.  Nowadays it’s so easy to get a girl’s number that it isn’t even special anymore. There’s no sense of accomplishment.  I’ve only asked for a few girls’ numbers in person and it’s not as easy as it seems.  It takes balls and social networking is turning every guy into a neutered puppy. 

So okay, we know that social networking makes it a lot easier to flirt and get numbers and communicate and shit, tell me something I don’t know.  Well, I’ll try.  I think I speak for all teenagers when we see someone hot on Facebook or Twitter and we get the urge to get in their pants.  But does anyone else feel like meeting people on Facebook is just not meant to be?  It doesn’t work out at our age.  Whenever I IM a girl that I very vaguely know on Facebook, I feel like a creep.  Am I desperate?  No.  I just find them attractive/interesting and I want to get to know them better.  But it just doesn’t feel right.  Requesting girls or guys we don’t know on Facebook and subtly flirting with them is human nature but it’s not real; it’s not normal.  It screws up the order of things. Maybe the Order of the Phoenix as well.

Unfortunately, we can’t change what is already so ingrained into our culture.  So now I’m asking myself whether I should talk to these few girls that I know on social networking and have seen in real life a couple of times.  Do I risk being creepy and message them on Facebook or do I just do nothing about it?  They always say “Let the game come to you” but I’m starting to think life would be a lot more interesting if I took advantage of the game and said “Fuck it” and just talked to these people.  And it’s not even just through Facebook, it’s people who follow you on Tumblr or Twitter that reblog or retweet you and you think they’re cute but you don’t know what to do about it.  Is it weird to talk to these people?  This is one of the moments where I really wish I grew up in the 1980s so I wouldn’t have to deal with this awkward bullshit and people would just interact face to face and on the phone and life would be a lot simpler.

But, like I said, we can’t change what social networking has done to our lives.  We can only learn to accept it and use it in ways that we feel comfortable with.  This was a long rant but it was something that has always been on my mind and I’ve never gotten the chance to write about it.  So this is an ode to all the pretty people we see on social networks that we usually stare at and do nothing about because sparking initial conversations online with them is too weird and nerve-wracking.  But my question still remains…

Is it wrong to use social networks as a gateway to talk to people of the opposite sex that we find interesting?  Or am I a fuckin creepo?  You decide.