#facehook

FaceHooks - when one nose hook is not enough at all. The FaceHooks consist of a classic nose hook that goes over the head, two additional (smaller) nose hooks that go past the side of the head and two mouth hooks.

Walking home one morning from the kids’ school, I launch my iPhone open to Email, Calendar, Google Voice, iMessage, facehook, instafan, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Dodo and The Atlantic apps. I also get notifications from Twitter, CNN, Vox, Time, Wired, Bloomberg, Huffpost, The Verge.

One morning, I see the following headline/notification: 

What Does Barack Obama Really Think of Donald Trump? ‘He’s Nothing But a Bullsh–ter’ (and is the actual title of the article). 

The lead-in/web preview is even worse:

Barack Obama Calls President Trump a Bulshitter 

The source of the article was People magazine but one of those above news outlets took it and reup-chucked it. And mind you, is using the present tense. 

If you read the article, you will see that the original source of this “quote” is one of the three biographers of a book that is being published about Obama’s presidency and supposedly his reaction was, “’He’s nothing but a bullsh–ter,’ Obama told two friends early last November, describing an election night phone call with Trump, in which the businessman suddenly professed his “respect” and “admiration” for Obama—after years of hectoring.” Basically. Fucking. Heresay. 

And that’s not the worst part. 

On Twitter, Stephen Hawking, Stephen fucking Hawking, shares the article accompanied by his 140 character nose-thumbing at the target of the “ad”. I was flabbergasted and disappointed at the same time. 

Pet Peeve here is READ the Goddamn article. Don't make the mistake of Stephen fucking Hawking and influence people wrongly. It is also rude to share things if you don’t read them as well. Why should I read something that you didn’t fully vet? Who are you, my fucking news app? As you can see, I already have plenty. 

Oh Facebook, your full of

Copycats and little brats

Saying "Hello" to the wrong fellow

Telling lies unsupervised

Half the world's on Facebook: user growth grinds to a halt at about the halfway mark in every country. In the UK, we're at about 48.75% of the population. To we young though, who from 18 – 34 years make up half of the UK's Facebook users, it feels like all the world's online, a feeling somewhat exacerbated when your mum starts cheerily popping up in the newsfeed.

This sense of an ubiquitous force could explain the motivation behind youth's Facebook fascination, after all as we've been taught throughout school, peer pressure is everywhere, and we all just want to look cool.

Admittedly, our Facebook fanaticism could be more simply due to the fact that we young social things have grown up with the net and are confident with it, and we are using Facebook purely for its innocuous, ostensible purpose of social networking. We're just making friends. Sure, in physical practise it's a solo, closely-knit occupation between me and my laptop, but, as Facebook-the-company is keen to stress, emotionally it's all about bonding with other people.

A recent study has announced that a correlation exists between those who have a high number of Facefriends, and the size of the social areas of their brains. Maybe then Facebook really is just a display of our uncomplicated desire to interact with others, increasing our very capacity to bond. But correlation does not equal causation. A desperately scraped-together AS in biology was able to teach me that at least.

The study is careful not to draw conclusions from this evidence along the lines of 'Facebook actively improves sociability.' As I imagine it, people with a thousand Facebook chums must be at least a little bit more gregarious than average in Real Life to have met enough people to be able to boast that many friends. (Including friends of friends, and their friends, and some cousins, distant ones. And some of their friends too.) So yeah, the extra lumps of socially-buzzing brain in these people might have been, and probably were, there before they even got to Facebook.

Call me a cynic, but I'm inclined to suggest the pull of the site is a little more self-involved than a sweet desire to make cyber daisy-chains with the other girls from school. It's a little more introverted, a little more narcissistic. We use Facebook, at least in part, to massage our egos and promote ourselves. A touch, in our mundane, anonymous and ever-growing, fame-obsessed world, of self-celebrity.

Seeing inane unrelenting statuses about which brand of cereal Sophie chose for breakfast, which coat Mark decided to buy, and which toenails Kelly is currently clipping slamming down my newsfeed always did serve as evidence towards a sneaking suspicion that humans are inherently egocentric, and that Facebook is that dark side's ultimate platform. But the recent additions of Spotify and The Guardian in the newsfeed, regaling me with the fascinating news of what my friends are listening to and reading right that second, ultimately crushed my faith in the website completely.

Those that make these posts don't really think these tiresome details will interest anyone, but it interests them for us to know them. We're willing to ruefully admit to 'Facebook-stalking', yet who is willing to stand up and say I spent a good two hours last night shamelessly self-promoting for the glorious gratification felt when someone I hardly know liked that utterly hilarious YouTube video I found?

It is competitive. We're all engaged, thoroughly subscribed, to the self-promotion – we're given boxes to fill in all about ourselves, encouraged to choose a not-quite-lifelike glossy snap via which we present ourselves to the world. We are well aware that our witticisms are read by loads of people we don't even know, and that gives us a total buzz. We hardly notice, if at all, what we're doing, because it's one giant egg and spoon race where we're all so determinedly concentrated on our own egg, that we barely have time to glance around and see that no one is looking up from theirs either.

We're in it for that pull of the little red bubble displaying a new notification that sucks us back every time, we are rewarded for our narcissism and we love it. We're all vaguely aware that Facebook-as-company is utterly dubious in terms of how it stores and sells the info we give it, and recently an Austrian law student Max Schrems has become the first to properly face up to this, beginning legal proceedings to tackle it dubbed Europe vs. Facebook.