Tag Archive: Facebook

  1. WKND COMMENT: Suggestions for Yale Facebook pages

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    Recently, I’ve noticed an absolute deluge of Yale-related Facebook pages cropping up all over my newsfeed, mentioning my friends or suggesting I ‘like’ them. Some, like Yale Insults and Yale Back-Handed Compliments, are entertaining in a schadenfreude-y, “make you feel like a terrible person for laughing” way. Yale Compliments and Yale PostSecret are nauseatingly sweet and soberingly real, respectively, and at least two other pages exist for the express purpose of continuing a proud tradition of indirect sexual advances — hey there, Yale Crush and Yale Hookups!

    Ostensibly because I care about furthering Yale’s culture, but realistically because I’m jealous that I have yet to be relevant enough to be featured on any of these pages, I feel compelled to suggest a few more Yale Facebook pages. And, hey, if any of you feel strongly about them either way, mind mentioning it to Insults or Compliments? I like getting notifications.

    Yale Mildly Impressed

    Because sometimes people do things that are neat, but not neat enough to warrant a gushing commendation on Yale Compliments. Some examples might include watching an entire episode of The Walking Dead without cringing or getting more than three substantial food items with a Durfee’s lunch swipe.

    Yale Section Asshole

    If you’ve ever fantasized about shutting down a section asshole with a devastatingly poignant rant (and if you haven’t, you might be the asshole) but never mustered the courage to actually do so, this page is for you! Post the diatribe you have perfectly scripted in your head, or submit just their name so they’re at least aware and can begin the road to recovery or greater, reactive asshole-ness.

    Yale James Franco Sightings

    Because never again do I want to waste an entire afternoon racing pointless laps between HGS, SSS, and the YUAG in the rain with nothing to guide me but sporadic updates from friends of friends.

    Yale Petty Complaints

    We all have that one friend who responds to any complaint by launching into a diatribe about how we need to get some perspective because some people have to constantly dodge drug lords/rapists/guerilla militia generals on their 52-mile hike to fetch water and hopefully some ibuprofen to keep the malaria headaches at bay. No more! This page will allow you to anonymously vent to the internet about how there weren’t enough chicken tenders or how the ID swipe into Silliman is way too far from the gate itself.

    Someone with too much time on their hands get on these — we could all use more procrastinatory tools heading into the last month before finals.

  2. Getting Over Diane

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    I don’t have lalophobia, and I wouldn’t label myself a “phone-fearing” individual. But I do suck at making phone calls.

    Several people have relayed to me that the “No. 1 reported fear” in the United States is of public speaking. It isn’t mine. I wouldn’t rank public speaking above my fear of waterboarding, identity theft or running out of toilet paper in a public restroom. Yet there’s something about picking up a phone that gets me worked up in weird, and probably very unnatural, ways. My mouth dries up like the feeling of sucking in air at the bottom of a Coke-flavored Slurpee, and words get stuck in my throat like large tapioca balls in a regular straw.

    Maybe I should start to “visualize myself successfully making or receiving calls” and “imagine a positive conversation and feeling good afterward.” This is a nugget of advice from an About.com column titled “When Phone Fear is Something More” by clinical psychologist Arlin Cuncic; it is filed under treatments for those suffering from “social anxiety disorder.”

    Alas, my poor phone skills — and others’ irrational fear of public speaking — are probably a result of what is considered one of the greatest technological advances to take place in the past 20 years. The Internet. I’d go so far as to call us the “beta” generation, the lab rats and test tubes for this brave new world. New technological innovation is also, conveniently, the primary reason I suck at making phone calls. In my case, the anecdotal evidence is compelling. I can trace it all back to the days of my youth and the moment I discovered the Internet was a way to connect with people. Perhaps I’m having delusions of grandeur, but I was surprisingly adept at online communication — employing wit, the right amount of “haha”s, and SAT-level words like “puerile.” I can trace it all the way back to third grade. My playground was my mom’s AOL account. I would chat up my older sister’s friends using my index fingers to tap out simple, and compound, sentences with proper punctuation. One friend in particular, Diane, was eight years older and in high school. We hit it off on a cyber level, although we’d also see each other when she came over to hang out with my sister.

    Over this past break, I went out to a hip(ster) bar in Oakland’s Jack London Square with my sister and her friends. Diane was there. At first she seemed curious about my first semester at Yale. What girls I’d met, what classes I’d taken and what the weather was like. And then, she brought it up. She leaned in extra close, like she was divulging a secret or a dirty fantasy, and began to reminisce about the long hours we spent communicating on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger for the uninitiated). I realized then how much time I’d wasted face-to-the-monitor, vying for her attention and affection.

    The whole experience was disturbing: I saw my “Internet life” flash before my eyes. My online courtship of Diane 13 years ago was the first of the many not-too-personal relationships that I would develop mainly online. The pattern continued through the years I spent on Myspace, and later Facebook. I find myself wondering whether my outlook towards communication would be different if I’d spent those long hours chatting with Diane on my family’s landline. And if she had never signed onto AIM, would I have grown so attached to the Internet?

    I don’t want to end up searching for advice from people like Arlin Cuncic anytime soon — “visualize it…” — so I’d better start while I’m ahead. My recent encounter with Diane serves as a nice bookend for a series of Internet profiles; my AIM, Myspace and Facebook are permanently deleted. Yet I hold onto my Twitter handle and LinkedIn account for reasons I can’t fully articulate. I recognize the pattern of building relationships primarily online, and am working to break it. Next time you text or email me for an update or to grab a meal on campus, you’ll probably receive a (stuttering, awkward) phone call from me. Hopefully when we’re old, we’ll be sipping schnapps and looking back fondly at our long, engaging phone conversations.

  3. “Will Adams is simply DA BEST!!!”

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    When I friended Yale Compliments on Facebook a few weeks ago, I did so under the impression that I would be tagged in a post soon after. The red speech bubble containing the number “1” would appear at the top of the page, and in one click, I could read the kind words a friend (but hopefully my crush) had sent in.

    “Will Adams is smart, funny and caring. He’s so multitalented too, like with his music skillz and his red hair skillz and his charming demeanor skillz. But he’s so humble about it and that’s what’s great about him! Any girl would be Krazy with a kapital K not to date this studmuffin.”

    As of writing, this has not happened yet. :’(

    Yale Compliments embodies the excesses of social networking, indulging our desire to have our personae manifested on the Interwebs. I discovered Yale Compliments during Thanksgiving break, when I had nothing better to do than to trawl my news feed. It inspired the most cynical of reactions. There was its debt to the cloying, hyper-positive aesthetic of “Glee” & Co. There was its user-generated messiness: half of the compliments barely qualify as such, unless you consider having “the finest ass of them all” a truly worthwhile pat on the back. There was its meaningless function: if everyone is the BEST person at Yale, then no one is. There was its inherent narcissism: you have to be a friend of Yale Compliments in order to be tagged but not to read or submit compliments, so a friend request suggests little more than a desire to be publicly lauded. Yale Compliments’ mission involves “[spreading] joy to the Yale Community.” Since friending her, I have received nary a trace of joy. Really, whenever the daily deluge of praises of people I don’t even know pours into my news feed, I groan.

    Perhaps I’m the problem. My unwillingness to view Yale Compliments as anything beyond a conduit for self-serving validation could mean that I’m just an asshole. Recoiling when people who I think suck receive praise and 53 “likes” suggests the same. But my annoyance is only ancillary to the real problem with Yale Compliments: the implication that without it, Yale would be joyless, students would feel unloved, and Cross Campus would look like that part in “Mean Girls” when the Burn Book becomes public. Our comfort with oversharing on the Internet has reached a fever pitch. To show appreciation for someone now requires an anonymous public post that over 1,900 people can see. To show appreciation for someone showing appreciation now requires a click of a thumbs-up icon. Yale Compliments champions this kind of passive activism, a system that allows its participants get by with the bare minimum.

    Is this platform even necessary, though? I would love to receive a daily email containing all the nice things my friends bothered to write to me, which I would read over breakfast. I won’t derive any fuzzy feelings from strangers reading about how nice/attractive/extremely attractive I am. I’d rather speak for myself and prove to you that I am the person that my hypothetical submission said I was (or maybe not — remember, I’m an asshole). In short: Let’s throw Yale Compliments into a well. My day-to-day interactions with Yale students cast them in a far better light than black-on-white text will ever do.

  4. New Facebook page improves self-esteem of sauce

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    Ketchup and mustard have finally earned their well-deserved day in the sun, thanks to a new Facebook page — “Yale Condiments” — that solicits compliments for the sauces from well-meaning Yalies.

    In a nod to the popular website “Yale Compliments,” which allows Yalies to submit anonymous compliments about other Yalies, Yale Condiments offers sheepish students a place to express their love for the zesty, all-American glory of barbecue sauce or the exotic allure of a spicy Dijon.

    “Sweet Baby Ray’s, I love your mouthwatering award-winning sauce,” reads one compliment. “I put it on everything. Hell! Sometimes I even put it on celery. When I was in 8th grade, I wrote a speech explaining your beauty.”

    Though the site’s origin is unknown, its mission to “spread joy to the Yale Community” through expressions of admiration for condiments has been well-received by the roughly 60 students who have friended the site. One particularly moving post worships the tangy crunch of Yale Dining’s tartar sauce, while another praises the versatile lovability of the classic Heinz ketchup.

    With the majestic emblem of French’s yellow mustard gracing its crest, Yale Condiments truly lives up to its motto, “Lux et Condiments.” Though the page is still a fledgling in the Facebook world, it stands in a class of its own, pioneering a new medium for condiment appreciation.