Facebook is already rather weird. What other tool enables late-night instant-chatting with former third-grade classmates and encourages hours wasted on a younger brother’s best friend’s older sister’s four wedding albums? Well, for better or worse, Facebook just got much weirder.
A snowy Friday night at Rednofive and Facebook steps from the computer screen to the bar scene. Tonight welcomes “Face 2 Face,” an event hosted by Jordan and Pam Spritz (of Jordan Foods of Distinction) and D.C. Crenshaw, and it’s meant to give people the opportunity to meet their Facebook friends in real life.However, things here remain puzzlingly technological. Computers—networked to huge-screen TVs—are the buzz points of bar activity. Facebook is opened on each one and people crowd around keyboards, more intent on adding new friends than actually meeting old ones.
“Type in your name and I’ll add you,” instructs one patron of another. “Now you sign on your account and accept my friendship.”
Such exchanges seem akin to the situations cell phones introduced to bars not too long ago. Then, we said goodbye to the endlessly self-preserving tactic of fake-number-giving, and today, if events like these keep up, we will slowly surrender our powers of limited profiling and—dare I say it?–Facebook friend rejection. Gasp! (Meaghan Strickland)
