Sarah Wrote That

I joined Facebook in 2008.  My initially ‘friending’ was between 50-70 people, college friends, new acquaintances from my first writing workshops (some of my friends already had—gasp—a hundred or more friends!).  It was fun, sharing photos, trading links I thought might be too goofy for my pre-Tumblr blog.  Best of all were witty third-person status updates, with the same nudging wit that now goes into hashtags.

With friend lists in the thousands or high hundreds, including people that you’ve met in all sorts of capacities or haven’t met at all IRL, you start to reconsider goofy status updates.  Facebook becomes a convenient way to send party invitations (remember evite?) and share photos.  But much else?  Only if you want to join groups such as “I turn down music when I’m driving so I can see where I’m going” (I actually do find street signs more easily with music off).

One-shot Facebook groups: secondhand hashtag gags for people without Tumblr or Twitter.

Why did everyone stop writing status updates in third-person?

Early-mid Facebook reminded me of early college campus computing, when friends started getting UNIX accounts (I am old!) and you could log out of PINE and see who else was on, and even what workstation they were using!  And maybe afterward they’d want to go to the snack bar and get fries.  You didn’t need to start writing that paper yet…

Fun.  But the fries were never as good as you remembered.

Facebook Helps You Connect And Share With People Who Aren’t In Your Life

The other night I logged onto Facebook and found that a classmate from a writing workshop two summers ago had accepted my friend request. 

Which I hadn’t sent.

In Facebook’s Help Centre, I found a number of users with the same complaint.  Is this Facebook’s latest trick?  (At the very least, think of their ad views from our navigating around, trying to find what the heck setting we’ve overlooked).

I couldn’t find any settings I’d overlooked that should have prompted this (though I hadn’t noticed that sometime in the last month or two Facebook stopped emailing me notifications when someone messaged me, commented on my photos, etc).

Sending automatic friend requests seems to me a categorically different level of overreach than what this spring’s kerfuffles concerned.  Changing settings and defaults on our accounts with no notification was egregious, and annoyingly time-consuming to fix, but it was essentially passive aggressive, an action once-removed, enabling the possibility of actions we hadn’t signed up for.

But performing an action on my behalf, without notifying me?

I like this woman, liked her fiction, enjoyed having her in class.  We’ve both gone on to MFA programs. There’s every reason for us to be in touch.

But that should be our decision.

Now We’re All On Facebook

They sat with Moira in the Croton-Harmon station, across from an escalator down to the platform. The train from Albany was forty minutes late.

“Amtrak.”  Bill rolled his eyes.

But it was still better than putting Moira on one of the two locals that came and went while they were waiting.  The locals would have taken her to Grand Central, and from there she would have had to schlep all her suitcases onto the subway or else pay for a cab to Penn Station.

“All the southbound trains leave from Penn,” Bill said.

“I know,” Moira said.  “That’s how I got here.”

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