It’s like two separate me’s exist: the guy that gets out of bed in the morning, yawns, shits, showers, shaves, works, works out, fits in a few meals, and then does it all again the following day. And then there’s the other guy that wakes up and updates Facebook statuses; uploads photos via his iPhone on Facebook and Twitter; and makes other gardening-like tweaks to his social image. You know this bro well, because you are also this bro.
The majority of what I say on Twitter or Facebook* is pretty much exactly what would come out of my mouth if you were to talk to me in person — except that the takeaway is slightly different. When people “like” my FB status updates or retweet my tweets, it’s close to the sensation I used to get when I got a chick’s phone number at a bar. A silent snicker to myself at how fucking great I am. How proud I am that I replied to that tweet I didn’t agree with; or wrote that witty status update about Beyoncé in lingerie. I post something and it lives forever. Try to think of how many things you do on a daily basis that are timeless. Not many.
Most of the time, though, my daily social media habits make me realize how big of an asshole I am. Do I really starve for (digital) social attention this damned much? Why would I ever write a status update as ridiculous as “Today’s going to be a good day”? Oftentimes, I’ll rattle off tweets that are surprisingly mean-spirited at actual living, breathing people — and to what end? Because I want my asshole-ishness to survive on the permanent digital record forever and ever?
All of this asshole-searching got me thinking about what the worst thing on social media is and — keeping with the theme of this ongoing BroBible column — what would make you feel like that particular social platform was the Worst Place on Earth on that specific day.
I’ve figured it out: the day of major events.
Now, I understand that “major event” is a pretty broad, loaded subject; but during one, on any given day, it has elicited the absolute worst tweets and Facebook status updates I’ve ever seen. This includes words, images, videos, and pretty much everything else you can imagine people doing wrong on social media. I’ve broken out five major-event scenarios to explain my reasoning.
Scenario #1: Birth of Somebody’s Child: Anytime anybody has a baby, you pretty much see everything except conception itself in Facebook pictures, status updates, videos, etc. One girl I barely knew in high school made her profile picture an image of her unborn child. A fetus, for shitssake. The only person allowed to do this is NOBODY EVER. Stop it.
Scenario #2: Important Political Events: This is when you find out which group of your “friends” is really just a bunch of closet racists and fucking idiots. For example, I’ve defriended numerous people on Facebook for status updates around election time. One guy laid into president Obama with such race-baiting idiocy, even his political-party-mates would’ve been embarrassed. Then there are those unoriginal bastards that just repeat what they heard Bill O’Reilly or Chris Matthews or some other bordering-on-comatose cable pundit said in a tweet. You can literally search how many of these mental midgets said the same thing. It’s like seeing herds of braindead cattle spilling over the side of a mountain like a waterfall.
Scenario #3: Epic Disasters: Just for a minute, let’s have a moment of silence for the fact that Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist on 9/11. Jesus. I don’t think I’d ever do a Google image search ever again if either had. A more up-to-date example that, unfortunately, rings true time and time again is the string of school shootings that have happened recently. Short of actually seeing pictures of murdered children on Facebook and Twitter, you always get the quasi-religious-freak cuckoos on Twitter that start the hashtag candlelight vigils (#PrayForTheChildren or something blindingly impersonal); and the wingnuts who use the tragedy as a reason to talk about their right to bear arms. Bear all the damned arms you want, buddy. Just not when a kid or 20 gets shot to death.
Scenario #4: Any Sporting Event: [Insert your favorite team’s name] won [insert a major sporting event name]? Great! Now shut the fuck up about it already. Nobody fucking cares about your stupid team**!
Scenario #5: Inclement Weather: Every time it’s sunny, rainy, snowy, sleety, haily — any type of weather, for that matter, short of the world ending — you get, like, 100 exactly-the-same Facebook status updates and a billion tweets saying, “OMG, look at how pretty the snowflakes look [insert photo]. #snowing,” as if nobody’d ever seen snow before. Maybe your bros in California haven’t, but they’re too busy tweeting about how great the weather is there to care anyhow.
*For this column, I’ll be talking only about these two platforms.
**If you go to my Twitter feed, for example, you’ll find countless tweets hailing the 2007 and 2014 Red Sox as the Second Coming. Point? I’m guilty of this, too; I can’t help myself.
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