With some 660,000 members (way over half a billion, folks), Facebook is certainly a "thing." Like very many of those hundreds of millions of people, I have been on it way too much lately, for a variety of reasons. One reason is my new shopping blog, World's Coolest Stuff, which I certainly hope you will visit, bookmark, and from which start all your online shopping. Hey, we all gotta eat.
Another reason is my fascination with it. Yesterday and today I tried to look at all the "friend suggestions," a list of people who know the people you know. Even though I'm sure that I have far fewer friends than average, both days I had to quit before getting to the end of that list -- if there is an end. The little scroll bar would grow longer at every turn. But what I saw thereupon was the fascination:
People who know people I know, of course. Hundreds of them. People whose names I recognized but didn't know why. People whose names I recognized, did know why, but still I didn't know. Interesting people. People whose pictures showed interests that I share. Handsome men. Beautiful women -- lots of them. Weird people, judging from pictures, or names, or both. Organizations. Activists. All walks of life. Baby-boomers. Their kids and grandkids. Friends of my kids, and their friends. People with foreign-sounding names. A cross-section of the world, so it seemed.
The beautiful women part got my attention on several levels, but one level was that it got my social-scientist, research juices flowing. When I was in grad school, we studied various "isms," like racism, ageism, and some less-recognized isms, like weightism and lookism. Lookism. Lots of beautiful women on Facebook. (Forrest Gump voice:) "Ah'm not a smawt may-an, but ah know what lookism i-yuz." One theory in lookism is that people who are culturally viewed as attractive get more attention, more friends, more favors, etc. Hmmm. I would love to see some research on this as it applies to statistics on Facebook. I mean, after all, we're talking about what will soon be three-quarters of a billion people in the study population. Geez. Staggering.
So that other blog of mine I mentioned? The one that is 75% shameless, capitalistic marketing and profiteering? It came to be because I was already on Facebook all the time; and I recognized that sometimes people listened to what I had to say. If they might buy something, and I get a few cents each time, why not?
This blog is another forum for what I have to say, too, but not about stuff to buy, as fun as that is. It's a forum for more serious stuff, like the one point of this post:
Facebook is scary.
