What do luxury car rental companies; escort services and suit rental places all share these days? Within each lies an incensed, seething, mutual resentment for "The Book". Facebook. The online monolith that makes it a daily habit of snatching up millions upon millions of devoted souls to feed its ever sprawling, ever-expanding bandwidth empire. And why has it targeted these unique business niches?
Facebook has sucked the fun & surprise out of the high school reunion quicker than a Dyson. That’s right, kaput. At least the best parts of these awkward jaunts back in time.
Ten years ago, Chuck, the uncomfortable band geek who never was really seen in sunlight, could pull up to Montego High’s 10 year reunion in a 2000 Corvette – the C5 -- as Chuck would never be a guy to drive the base model, come on! Super glued to his elbow would be Svida, a bomb shell blonde who looked like she had been manufactured in the clean rooms at Intel, and both of them would be dressed to the nine’s in their choice of Versaci, Hugo Boss, Gucci, Prada, and more. Chuck probably in pinstripe, sporting a two button, as three’s aren’t set to return for a couple more years in the fashion world.
And the classmates, the same social rulers of his youth, the one’s who gnawed on his every flaw, sent the guy home in tears for kicks, built themselves up by blowing the doors off other self esteem’s, would flock, enamored, asphyxiated by this apparent ‘Swan’ story. They’d have questions but you know our man Chuck would have the answers. He’d worked on this bit for months. An astronaut? Navy Seal? Foreign film star? You name it; Chuck could of pulled it off. The dude rehearsed harder than kid who landed the lead in Slumdog. This was to be our mans long awaited masterpiece. His redemption.
This of course before a man by the name of Mark Zuckerberg and his social networking cronies at Facebook went and extinguished the party quicker than a hook and ladder on a trash can fire.
Fictional confession; Chuck still lives in his mothers basement and runs internet scams off e-bay but that’s neither here nor there.
You see, by the time you or me shows up to our reunion -- I prefer social status realignment -- every other plug in the room with a Ethernet connection is going to know our background, employment, marital status, interests, hobbies, favorite quotes, sexual orientation, what we drive, if we are more of a swinger or someone who takes what they can get, our travels, our religious beliefs and twenty two thousand random mind dumps we affectionately classify as “Status Updates”. Sweet.
Just try to pull a fabricated bio over your Internet trolling mate’s heads, I dare you.
Thanks to Facebook you can’t hide from anything anymore. Worse yet, people you absolutely wanted nothing to do with in high school, perhaps despised, can still track you more ferociously than a FedEx parcel. Surprises are extinct, no jack in the box here kids. The fact is that your life, in all its glory is clipped to the laundry line, flowing in the wind more free than Mel Gibson’s groin area in Brave Heart, for all to gander. Ah…technology!
Yet who knows, maybe all this preceding information might help the reunion vibe. Maybe instead of everyone posturing, doing their best Meryl Streep or Michael Douglas, projecting an aura of success and happiness no matter their current circumstance, maybe we can all show up and simply enjoy one another’s company? Leave the rank and file, self worth competition on the sidelines, talk about the good ol’ days, when we loved few, liked some and despised many. Maybe facebook has made it all a little more “Real”. Which in itself is another attribute to how disgusting the social networking phenomenon is really becoming. Yeesh.
Facebook is the future; there is no getting around it. Every day it taps into our behaviors, our collective souls, and mining information and reflecting it back in shiny new features we foam at the mouth to ‘add’ to our walls. Yet, for all the good press and praise, and functionality this techno-organic being brings to our 2010 lives, surely it has to have some flaws, and the death of the reunion is one of them!
The cool Chuck stories of old are gone. The curtain has been vaporized and our virtual lives get more hits online than 'Charlie bit my finger!'. From here you have two options folks. Firstly, you can merge onto to the moral freeway and clean up your act, live healthy, fulfilling, joyous lives that you are proud of. If you aint that kind of guy get wise, upload a Lamborghini to your wall pics, change your relationship status to “Engaged to (insert exotic Russian woman’s name). “ For this of course you must ask the next super model you see on the street for a harmless pic, hugging preferably, and lastly set your employment info to CEO of Chuck Co., international marketing agency. You see the Chucks still have a chance; it’s merely the game that’s changed!
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