While at least 95 percent of the time I spend on Facebook is definitively counterproductive, I’m going through yet another phase where it feels downright unhealthy. And it has everything to do with the “People You May Know” section.
Once a tiny sidebar sandwiched between easily ignored ads, it’s now a prominently placed box that appears constantly in my feed, hawking scores of potential new “friends,” all randomly gathered by the almighty Facebook algorithm. Dismissing it is impossible, for I’m too curious about (a) who might be in it and (b) how my FB activity influences its content on any given day. For instance, after friending a well-known female media figure, my box was instantly flooded with attractive women who looked like they really had their sh*t together. But it quickly reverted back to its default mode, and since I’m a gay male who loves photography, “People You May Know” basically translates to “People Fondling Cameras and Middle-Aged Men Who Can’t Keep Their Shirts On.”
This is an essential tool for a newcomer, of course, as it rapidly builds a social network, connecting you with old friends, distant relatives and former colleagues. But for someone like me, who’s somehow amassed 1,390 friends, it’s been scraping the bottom of the barrel for years. I used to browse through the selection and be like, “Oh, there’s that copy editor I used to have so much fun with back at that job I hated!” Now I’m all, “Oh, there’s that guy I made a drunken, failed pass at 20 years ago” and “There’s that other guy I made a drunken, failed pass at 15 years ago.”
Often this leads to me friending more and more people that I’ve never come close to meeting in real life. As someone who’s benefited numerous times from the network element of social networking, I have no qualms about reaching out to people of my ilk—fellow writers and photographers and music obsessives. But I’m also a happily married man who’s never downloaded a dating app, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t sent a friend request just because I thought someone was cute. In this case, “People You May Know” translates to “People Who Provide Vicarious Thrills and/or Make Me Feel Like a Letch.”
But here’s where things get really psychotic: From time to time, one of these people—the ones, I repeat, I’ve never met or even corresponded with—will unfriend me, and inevitably, inexplicably, I wonder how it all went wrong. Friends (the flesh-and-blood kind, with whom I have dinner and talk on the phone) assure me they were probably just housecleaning, whittling down their FB profile. But still I scream, “Come back, Person Who Means Absolutely Nothing to Me! I can change!”
These are the moments when it’s clear that I’m spending way too much time on Facebook, that I’ve done everything I can possibly do on Facebook, that I really shouldn’t still be on Facebook! And yet, I just noticed someone named Stephen King now qualifies as a Person I May Know. Evidently he’s a writer, too? I just sent him a friend request. We’ll see how it goes …
