How to be annoying on Facebook.

Even though I have over 1200 friends, there are still a handful of people who are obnoxious enough to make me hate every time I see they have done anything. and you would think that with 1200 or so people updating their Facebook at random intervals, things would fall off my newsfeed or people would be easy to lose in the crowd. Not the case for everyone.

So I will try to share with you what exactly it is that people do to make me feel a sense of dread whenever I log into Facebook.

Please can we go back to the “________ is” prompt? please? Then if people list off everything they have done in the past two hours since they last updated, they will sound like idiots because they will sound like idiots, grammatically speaking. Anyway, on to my list.

• Your daily to-do list. It could be interesting to update your status with what you are doing today if you are doing interesting things. It is not interesting if it is something you do on a regular basis and involves mundane tasks like “eating lunch” or “laundry” or “driving to work.”

• Highly emotional status updates. People are most guilty of this when they are sad or hurt or angry. Understandably there is a time and place for everything, so it’s not like being emotional in a status is bad. Note that I used the word updates, plural. Go buy a journal or something, because when you write a whole bunch of emotional updates, you just seem emotionally unstable and unable to work through anything yourself.

• Christians who are mean to Kanye West. OK, not just Kanye West but I noticed it after he was a jerk about Taylor Swift. Christians are really mean to people they don’t know in their status updates. Obama sucks, people who defend same-sex marriage are heathens, anybody who has had an abortion is a heartless piece of crap… except I am not exaggerating. I hope that when your time comes to stand before God, that he holds you accountable for all of the terrible things you wrote about people on your Facebook, disguising it as stating your opinion.

• Christians who are just plain stupid with their Facebook. If you say you are a Christian, then people will assess everything you do as what a Christian does and who a Christian is, and ultimately, who Jesus is and what Jesus does. Does that seem a bit extreme? Maybe. But we’re the ones daring to declare that we are following Jesus Christ. Whenever I see people complaining a lot about a ministry they’re involved in, getting angry about being treated unfairly, saying mean things about people they don’t know, making rude remarks about our politicians.. I often wonder if they discussed these things with God before they shared them with their social network.

• Making reference to personal situations in the public areas of Facebook. A few years ago Mark and Sarah had baby chickens. I picked one out and named it after myself. Sarah said there was a chance I had actually picked out a rooster, so one day I left her a comment asking if she knew if it was a boy or a girl yet. Anybody who saw that comment (people I know via the newsfeed and people I DON’T know via her wall) could quickly conclude that Sarah was pregnant. That was not the purpose of that question, and imagine my surprise when a few months later I found out Sarah actually WAS pregnant! It was an innocent mistake on my part, but I’ve seen it happen where it wasn’t a funny coincidence. If you care enough to write it on someone’s wall, care enough to send it privately in a message.

• Thinking you are the center of the universe. Social networking has given everyone the delusion of being a celebrity, of being more important to more people than they actually are. Blogging is even kind of like that.. except I’m completely realistic and know that only 6 people get e-mails about when I update my blog, 38 people follow it on Networkedblogs, and like 15 people follow in in their Google reader. No delusions about celebrity here. The problem is that not everybody has a realistic grasp on their audience. They understand that what they write on the internet has the potential to reach millions of people – and therefore assume that everything they write on the internet is read by millions of people.

• Constant changing of the relationship status. I wrote a blog mentioning this before, called Things Single Girls do to Annoy Me. It is okay to be okay with being single. Generating attention by removing “single” from your profile and having everyone assume you are dating, or writing “it’s complicated” as a code for “my crush does not like me back yet, but I am determined!” or even going from dating to it’s complicated to dating to single to dating to it’s complicated… stopppp with the drama. Be okay with where you are at. Don’t involve everyone in your drama.

Not an exhaustive list, but enough.

My solution to all of these annoyances, the one piece of advice I want to give to the 20 really obnoxious people on my friends list: Get. A. Journal. Remember what it’s like to be private about your emotions, to be seen as a stable person. We all have our ups and downs, we all get frustrated, we all feel helpless/hopeless/confused/insecure, we all have opinions.. but begin practicing discernment. Some of the smartest, funniest people I know are people who only reveal how smart and funny and creative they are when provoked or unable to hold it in any longer.

And I’d also like to point out that I do not think that you are obnoxious just because you post frequently. I think Rob Birks is one of the best people on my facebook and he updates fairly regularly. He doesn’t update just for the sake of updating, but always has something clever and encouraging to say. Of course, I might just be biased because I think Rob Birks is one of the best people in the world. But I notice Rob on Facebook and do not feel any sense of dread or frustrating.

And I’d also like to point out that I do not want to block people on Facebook. It would make more sense to delete them, and I just am not willing to stir up that kind of drama. and for the record: this is NOT directed towards specific individuals, and I am being serious about that.