Being Facebook Famous is the new popularity contest. Same cliques, new rules.
Entertainment Life

To Be Facebook Famous: Same Cliques, New Rules

Being Facebook Famous is the new popularity contest. Same cliques, new rules.

Being cool on Facebook seems to be one of the newest fads. Everyone wants friends on Facebook and wants people to like what they post. People start Facebook fan pages hoping to be noticed. The Facebook world pretends to be above high school bullshit, but in reality, it isn’t. There aren’t lunch tables and corners for the cool people anymore; instead, we have groups and the ability to tag.

People you thought you were friends with are tagging people they claimed to hate. They share things on their walls, being even faker than they were in high school. Instead of being overheard whispering lies and drama, people can now inbox one another. We can sit on our asses and have entire conversations about what someone was wearing today.

We post photos with sayings, being assholes without even having to use brain cells to do so. We can post random, vague status updates talking shit about the girl who smiled a little too kindly at our significant others even though she is on our friends list. We can have entire conversations with someone on Facebook and pretend we don’t know each other when we run into one another at the store. Apparently, we still can’t be friends in real life, but the virtual world is a free for all.

Everyone wants the cool girl from our class as a friend, even though we wanted to claw her eyes out in school. The girl who stole our boyfriend and called us names is one of our BFFs on Facebook. She gets the inside jokes, the event invites, and the BFF photo posts.

We have mommy groups where we can share pictures of our kids and brag about how advanced they are. We get to put other parents down for not reading to their children twenty times a day. Our children are dressed up and rolled out for everyone to see. We don’t have to be involved with cutest kid competitions anymore; we just post the cutest pictures on Facebook for everyone to see. We sit smugly behind a screen, watching the like count grow.

Everyone wants to be a blogger and writer on Facebook. We try to come up with the statuses that slightly offend yet make people laugh. Things we wouldn’t say in the real world slip from our fingertips without a second thought.

There are groups for Facebook page owners where we get to look down our noses at the new kid in class. The writers and bloggers who are unknown are shunned until they write something everyone likes. They join the cool kids group and become just as bitchy as the rest of us.

On Facebook, we can act holier than thou even though in real life, we are quiet and shy. If one of our friends is offended, we rally around them and talk shit to the offender. We become bullies and stop thinking about compassion and kindness. Every fight is turned into a public display of who is cooler than whom.

We delete people from our friends list, only to add them back once they kiss our ass. Or, we add them back as friends because one of our friends is talking to them. We have to stalk them and know what they are up to. Being two-faced has never been so easy. Being Facebook Famous has never been so important.

I’m twenty-six and feel like a teenager most of the time I look through my Facebook news feed. I’m not impressed with the need to be famous on the internet. I’d rather sit at the “Who the hell are you?” table than be lobbed into a new clique on Facebook.

Where do you stand on being Facebook Famous?