Mike Senker – How can you have 500 friends

I DON’T do Facebook and I don’t do Facebook for a reason. I actually have an account because years ago I signed up I but don’t use it. The reason I don’t use it is because it’s scary intrusive and I don’t like being told what to do.

For instance, there is an advert on TV for toilet tissue and at the end of the ad it says follow us on Facebook … are you mad? Why on earth would I want to follow a company that makes loo rolls on Facebook? Maybe if I subscribed to Faecesbook I might have some interest but otherwise none, nada, nothing!! How can you have 500 ‘friends’?  I understand a bit if you are famous or something, bands etc. so people can see where you are performing or want to be a fan but a normal person having 500 ‘friends’ is nonsense! I bet all you Facebookers out there don’t even know half the people who are your ‘friends’ on there. Yeah, yeah, I know you post lovely photos and tell people that your home is going to be empty for the next two weeks – all important stuff.  If I want to send my family photos, that’s what I do – I send them to my family. I don’t send them to 250 friends of friends who then decide to ‘like’ my pics. Plus, you wear your ‘likes’ as some kind of medal ….. Hey I got 47 likes …so what?  The scariest thing about Facebook is how it suggests people you might want to be ‘friends’ with. I decided the other day to have a look at my account and there they were – pages of suggestions of people I may like to connect with. Now some of these people I didn’t know and they were mutual friends of the 15 people I had as friends. I don’t allow this app to access my email address book or my contacts so I was amazed to see the name of a lady that I vaguely remembered because she had a very unusual name. I had met her once. She worked in Sunglasses Hut in Santa Monica 20 odd years ago and at that time I had a lot of shops in the UK and if I saw an outstanding salesperson I would say ‘if you ever come to the UK here’s my business card, give me a call’.  I received an email from her saying ‘nice to meet you and if I ever come to the UK I’ll get in touch’ and that was it. I never heard from her again until Facebook dug and dug and somehow decided that I might want to be friends with a stranger I had a conversation with 20 years ago in a shop 12,000 miles away ….. I rest my case!!