Goodbye, Facebook Panda

As promised (like I always keep my promises), I am updating before the month of February has even caroused its way in. Instead of being productive and working on my application for a travel fellowship, I have decided to catch up on recent celebrity gossip. I even read this recent shocking SPORTS news story, compliments of The Boyf, of some internet girlfriend death hoax of former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o. When I start reading sports news, you know excrement has hit the fan.

In fact, approximately two weeks ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. Apparently the company also just came out with Graph Search, which is in pilot mode but seems futile at this point (perhaps it's me). Graph only searches through your friends or public profile information, which would also require people to update their profile with all of their interests and information. With the previously known onset of job interview slaughter through Facebook (myself included; remember that incident in undergrad with Dr. Professor?), most people have decided to use aliases instead of their real names for professional purposes. I also don't/didn't like to associate Facebook with my professional life, but after a while it seems inevitable that your coworker "adds" you as a friend and you would seem like a donkey-hole to reject. Although Facebook itself doesn't care what your name is because it just generates popular data from "the masses", I'm starting to get annoyed by the constant invasion of Facebook into EVERYTHING. "Vote for me," "Look I'm married now," "Look I'm skinny/fat/depressed/emo/hipster now," "Here's a photo of me looking drunk at a party even though I talked to no one the entire time because I was ON FACEBOOK on my cell phone and just snapped this photo before I left to preserve my online image." I realized that most successful and respectable (albeit usually older) people do not have Facebook, or at least keep it private enough so that you can't see them parading around in their underwear or asking for help with a survey all the time. Plus, I'm happy with where I am right now and the people I'm surrounded by, including The Boyf, so I don't really care about sharing that with other people. Let's be honest...are you REALLY happy about how happy I am? Because I'm only slightly excited when I see someone from high school get fat. TRUTH.

So you see I'm back.

And even though I had already started the deactivation process a while ago (permanently closing chat, stopped taking/uploading photos, checked maybe once a day, put up The Office of Misogamy poster...), I still feel so much...clearer...after cutting all ties with Facebook. It was easy to phase out of MySpace because Facebook was there, and now it's not hard phasing out of Facebook because I still have LinkedIn and EMAIL. The stupidest excuse I have heard of people who have Facebook is their "networking" abilities. Why not just use LinkedIn? And for your grandma, why don't you just send her an email with some photos of yourself, instead of broadcasting everything to her and the rest of the world? If she can use Facebook, she can probably check email. And she will feel special that you actually sent her the pictures instead of whoring yourself out to the internet. The only problem I really have without Facebook is that I can't access my photos. I suppose I could go and see if it's possible to download all my albums (it probably is, but I'm too lazy to do it now), but since Facebook is both good and evil, "deactivation" doesn't actually terminate your account - it just makes your account invisible to other people. You can still access your own account and retrieve your photos. For the future, though, I'll hopefully get to buy a nice camera and can just create a Tumblr account. Or, you know, just keep them on my computer and blog.

For a while (and probably even now), people were obsessed about creating an online profile of themselves that was separate from their "real" self. Now we've integrated with technology even more, but seem to have become even less integrated as human beings. Back in March, I participated as a student representative on a panel for Stay With It Facebook (ironically) Day of Engineering. EVERYONE (these are all executives and industry people) was tapping away on their phones. The only person that actually initiated some sort of communication with me was Mr. Charles Bolden, director of NASA. We had passed each other on the way to the bathroom; he was going out, and I was going in. All he did was smile at me, and I laughed because we had bumped into each other so clumsily. I had no idea who he even was at the time. And afterward (when I did know who he was), he gave me a hug and wished me good luck in school.

So here's my question: What the hell happened?

How are people so obsessed with themselves and their projected online image/profile...their "relationships" with people online, while in real life, I can't even have dinner with people without them "tagging" us at a restaurant or uploading a picture of the food online. I walk onto a bus or elevator or any other public space. Instead of what normal people would have done 10 years ago (saying HELLO), everyone is staring at their phone. I admit I'm a culprit of this, also. There have always been awkward times when I don't want to start a conversation and just randomly punch numbers into my phone, even though I have no one to talk to. But all this, I hypothesize, has been fostered by the increasing technology that is around us. It has made us feel uncomfortable to be ourselves, and to be around other people. I am and always will be a people person. I have to talk to someone IN PERSON to understand their emotions, laugh, learn, share ideas... Programs such as Google Drive have been immensely helpful in doing group work and working together online. But nothing (I hope) will ever replace what it's like to actually have a conversation with someone. I have been constantly disappointed by people who just aren't genuine at all. What's the point of building a relationship (online or off) with someone if you can't trust and rely on those people? I believe that I have great relationships with a small group of people here, and we hardly ever communicate using technology (phone sometimes to organize, but not talk).

Technology should be used to FACILITATE human communication and relationships, not replace it. Of course, The Boyf and I would have never been able to have a long distance relationship without cell phones. But we never really talked using email or chat. In fact, I'd prefer hand written letters over some public "I miss you". It's way more personal. I have two pen pals that I write regularly, and even though we correspond maybe every 3 weeks, it feels like for the past 6 years our friendship hasn't skipped a beat.

Anyway, enough of the rambling. Another exciting piece of information is that I have ventured into my first cell study of graduate school! Disgusting, I know. It's one of those things that was so common during my undergraduate research, but was "off limits" for a while in grad school since I had to perform a lot of materials characterization and optimization before the actual experiment. Ho hum. I hope to finish the experiment and get data this weekend (Happy MLK Day!), and hopefully have something to add to my poster for the Orthopaedic Research Society conference next weekend. Which is also my first conference in grad school! I've been learning a lot in lab thus far, and am excited to get started on some new things. For one, I'll be doing some hands on prototyping of scaffolds that I get to design and create myself (with the very much needed and appreciated help of a design instructor)!

Classes haven't been too terrible in terms of workload, but I do need to buckle down and get started on my proposal. Even though I've written the proposal itself (without the preliminary data), I need to go over it with my advisor because all these new projects I am working on at the moment will probably sneak themselves in at some point as well. Ah, GRAD SCHOOL! I won't bore you with details, except something exciting: apparently the Jack Daniels headquarters and tour is located 3.5 hours from me! And it's FREE (not the whiskey, just the tour...you sick poop). As soon as I get some headway on these new research projects (inshAllah), I am going to go!

If you read this and you believe that the end of Facebook is near (or not), comment below! Also, if you like alcohol (HELLO)!