Humans Are Screwed Thanks to Guys Like Me

How to operate Facebook:

1. Log-in.

2. Make sure to update your status, so everyone knows you are alive.

3. No matter how well you know the people in the upper right corner of your home feed, make sure to wish them a Happy Birthday! God forbid you run into one of them at the grocery store and they throw a kumquat at you for forgetting they turned 26 last December.

4. Check. Your. Notifications. Do NOT let somebody’s GIF of a random dude shimmy-ing and accompanying message comparing you and her/him to a hypothetical situation in which said dude was inspired to shimmy, go unnoticed.

5. CRITICAL: Scroll down the news feed at least until it reloads once – any further, you are creeping. But any less, and you clearly don’t give a shit about your friend’s pictures.

6. Click “Like” on any pictures or links that make you smirk. If you are feeling especially peppy, type “LOL” into the comment box! It will make those people feel loved.

How to Operate Twitter:

1. Log-in.

2. Scroll down on the timeline. Anything interesting, funny, or controversial? The answer is yes, unless you are super lame and don’t follow anyone that fits in the above categories.

3. Retweet anything and everything that is funny, regardless of how offensive it is to entire cultural groups.

4. Click “favorite” on any of your real-life friends’ tweets, to signify that yes, you do still love them. And yes, you have nothing worthwhile to tweet in return so this gold star will have to hold you over as an emblem of my affection for your magnificent phone-thumbing abilities.

5. Check your mentions. If anyone is still arguing with you about last night’s high school curling match on ESPN2, shut…them…down. Something like, “DUDE, check the stats before you talk to me – Goldstein is leading the STATE in adjusted brush technique this year! #Dumbass” should do the trick!

6. When addressing your adoring public of 250 followers (most of whom are porn bots anyway), make sure to start your farewell tweet for the night with “Well, Tweeps,” and then say something absurdly profound and original like “tomorrow’s another day. I’m gonna get thru this! #SelfConfidence #Potential #HopesNDreams”.

How to Use Instagram:

1. Log-in.

2. If you think it’s artsy or funny, it’s probably not. Take a picture anyway.

3. Make sure to use one of those filters that makes it look like the sun is about to bump into the Earth, creating a weird glare on the top of the picture.

4. You absolutely MUST hashtag “#nofilter” at the end of your message, even though you used a filter and it looks exactly the same.

5. Speaking of the message, it better have some kind of title to go with it, as if you just captured a work of art in your iPhone lens.

6. Share to Twitter and Facebook. You wouldn’t want the people stupid enough to not yet Instagram their lives to miss your pictures.

How to Use Foursquare:

1. Don’t. It’s really freakin’ creepy. (Says the guy who uses it daily)

How to Interpret this blog:

I’ll admit it. I’m part of the problem. There is no getting around it, no excuses to be made. Does that mean I’ll stop? Probably not.

My pupils can dilate into hashtags, my hands can turn into big, clunky thumbs-up signs, my brain can start processing images with an array of glittery filters…I just don’t care. I’ll probably still check my robotic self in at whichever cafe I happen to be perusing FourSquare in, though I may not even realize I’m at a cafe until the GPS tells me so, because my little Twitter-eyed, Facebook-handed, Instagram-brained self is a zombie. Not one of those cool zombies either. Just an annoying, nerdy, sometimes hip, apathetic zombie who only preys on flesh when his iPhone battery dies (every eight hours, I might add).

Yes, I’m completely, totally, unequivocally hooked into social media. I can think of any number of reasons why, but I’ll just go with the basics: it’s fun, it’s easy, it’s interactive, and it’s a totally free platform for personal expression.

I’m not going to unplug, either. I like being hooked in to people around the world. I like being able to turn on my phone and start a three-day debate with a random guy in Columbus over whether high or low socks look better on a baseball uniform (for the record, the answer is high socks – feel free to tweet me if you disagree).

I like being able to write a blog that normally only my parents and myself (at least thirteen times, just to make sure my number of reads doesn’t look too pathetic) would read, and then posting to Reddit and suddenly having a couple hundred strangers appreciating and/or making fun of my ideas and passions.

And I especially like being inspired by other people’s ideas or pictures or thoughts. Now that I’ve effectively pinned my opinion on social media to your brain and tumbled through all the ways I love it, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty here:

Humans are screwed thanks to guys like me.

Seriously. Social Media is a dangerous weapon, and I’m openly abusing it. The difference is, I know how to use it. I haven’t lost my ability to interact face-to-face with a living, breathing person. I’ve formed relationships via conversation and physical touch. I’ve felt the real, stinging emotions that humans feel – not the radiating glow of a computer screen slowly digging into your skin and infecting your bones.

People need to realize that social media is what it is. It’s media. A social form, yes. But it is media. It’s not real, tangible contact.

So don’t take it so seriously. If we aren’t friends on Facebook, that’s not a reflection of my opinion on you as a person. Hell, if we ARE friends on Facebook, it doesn’t mean we are actually going to meet up and chat about politics and the stock market and the new secretary’s affinity for filing her nails at her desk (that sounds awful anyway – note to self, don’t ever talk about aforementioned topics).

If I unfollow you on Twitter, it means I don’t want to read your tweets. It doesn’t mean I just subliminally told you to fuck off. Once I’ve followed you, I have not made a legally binding vow to keep reading your angry diatribes about life, love and the pursuit of retweets.

Let’s just put it this way: I have 300 followers on Twitter. Most of them are NOT my real friends. They are people who liked something I said at one point or another. Maybe they felt obligated to follow me because I followed them. Whatever the case, if you have 30,000 followers, you are not 100 times cooler than me.

It means you Tweet 100 times better than I do. Congrats!

Just please refer to the above user guidelines for social media…and then completely disregard them.

My friends are the ones I can call on Skype from thousands of miles away and hold a conversation for hours with. Or the people I can meet up with on a random Wednesday night for beer and wings.

The people who don’t care if I like their status, favorite their tweets and comment on their check-ins. Please use social media responsibly. And don’t let it take over the human race – we are all WAY too interesting to let that happen.

End, rant. Goodnight #Tweeps!