Once upon a time, there was a site called Myspace. It wasn’t horribly clumsy, or unintuitive. You could listen to laggy music or customize your page with seizure-inducing graphics and add enough Marilyn Monroe quotes to make it take 37 years to scroll down to the bottom if that tickled your fancy. You could also keep it simple if you liked. For the first time, all your friends could know just what kind of sandwich you had, or at which precise moments you hated your parents and/or loved your friends, that is except for when no one could understand you, of course, and just who you loved more than anyone else after knowing them for a week. All without even needing to talk to those freaks! Just post it online. You could upload photos that showed not too much cleavage, just enough, or displayed your bro muscles hidden underneath your backwards hat(I don’t know what was on it, this was before everyone had a boner for Monster and UFC). None of this was necessary, but you did it, because it beat doing something productive, and because everyone else was doing it.

That was a long, long time ago. Historical records would say that Myspace started in 2004(I think, I don’t care enough to look it up), which is equivalent to the Roman times as far as the internet is concerned. As time went on, Myspace became more and more deluged with ads, the layout become more obtrusive and slow, with Facebook becoming the popular choice. Facebook was like Myspace, but far simpler. You couldn’t have your own custom page with three music players playing simultaneously, or seizure-inducing glowing Marilyn Monroe quotes, and it was only for college kids. Then they stopped that silly restriction, and at some point everyone used it, because everyone else was using it. That should have sufficed, but there were things you could do on Myspace you couldn’t do on Facebook. You couldn’t post blogs, at least not at first. Later they added notes, or documents, or whatever the hell they consider it. Groups were pretty much impossible to find, but that’s okay, they sucked on Myspace too. It was simple, but apparently not simple enough.

In 2009(I think? I don’t care), Twitter was established. Not merely content to simplify the basics, they really wanted to simplify things. Who cares about the picture of you and your friends drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade even though you’re only 18? Who cares what school you go to and the painstaking effort you’ve taken to list no less than 371 different movies you like, instead of a handful of your favorites and a brief list of genres? Fuck all that shit! Twitter was just about your status updates. But whoa, hey there, hold on! Don’t get carried away. 140 characters, that’s all you get, asshole. Anything more than that is long-winded and needs to be blogged.

Well, what about blogging? There have been livejournals and endless derivatives since the Roman Internet times, but they’re a little more personal. What about something that’s a little more interactive? Something that a lot of people could potentially see? Actually, fuck making your own content, just share what other people have posted! And that’s where Tumblr. comes in. I’m not sure what happened to the “e” in Tumbler, maybe they ran out of characters in a Twitter update and had to kill a letter. Nor do I understand the need for a period, which seems harsh and unnecessary. Like, hey asshat, stop there! No need to keep going with this name, cut that off right now and mark it discretionally with a period. Anyway, that’s what Tumblr is, reposting things that other people have reposted.

But wait, you can do that on Facebook now, too! You can share things that other people have posted, and your dim-witted friends won’t pay attention to the original poster, giving you likes and comments as if you spawned that done-to-death abused meme

 yourself! And you can also link your Twitter comments to Facebook, so that your friends can see even more of your complaints about people in your life that you don’t have the balls to actually talk to in public! No Facebook comments on Twitter though, remember, 140 characters asshat.

What we have now is a giant social media circle-jerk. It’s all a big fucking waste of time. You can repost the same reposted shit on your Facebook as your Tumblr, and retweet other people’s tweets on your Twitter or Facebook. I’m not part of the socially crippled elitist chunk of the internet that visits sites like 4chan to talk down about everything and create memes, but even I am annoyed at seeing friends that barely know how to use Facebook regurgitating memes that I’m pretty sure they don’t understand, or at least can’t see the satire in. It’s become a deluge of hundreds of the same images or status updates posted by different people, only slightly modified to be slightly different. There’s barely anything original, just people copping a feel and passing it along. What the hell ever happened to being original? Don’t you lame ducks have anything unique to say? Maybe there are original things being said, they’re just lost in the avalanche of “that moment when” status updates and pictures of cats and things that come from sites with “fail” in the name(not counting this site, unfortunately, we’re over the character limit and simple folks are unable to retain this much information).

I see this meme at least 5x a day on Facebook, that's 5x too many. Fuck this meme and anyone who thinks it's hilarious.

So what’s my problem with all this? It’s great that things are so interactive, but why can’t the masses all be original, and why the fuck do they have to use 400 sites to do it? Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Myspace(for the extremely old or really young 

internet generation), and undoubtedly a litany of other sites that I know not of and care not to learn about. It’s all the same shit being spread about every site, can’t we condense this a little bit? In an age of phones with awesome 3d games that drain the battery in an hour and redneck degenerates that wander around Wal-Mart talking on Bluetooth headsets to whoever the blue hell actually stills talks on the phone with their throathole instead of texting, we clearly have the technology, but we’re not making the most out of it. Not most of us, at least. All of this shit is getting old. How do I know? Because every group under the sun is using it. I can’t watch an episode of Monday Night RAW without the WWE facefucking me 100 times with hashtags and statuses about what’s trending worldwide, or see pretty much any advertisement without a facebook and twitter link.

If you don't see this shit somewhere on a website, it's probably from 1997.

The cool kids will tell you that when everyone uses something, it’s not cool anymore. I’m not cool, and sadly am only getting older, but I can tell you the same thing. The more something gets used and spread out, the more dumbed down it has to get. Not just dumbed down, but dumbed up too, the simplicity becomes lost and then utterly lost, with no chance of finding its way. History repeats itself. Facebook is constantly adding more shit and giving you the choice of accepting it or not accepting it…yet, though you’ll get it anyway. The newest piece of digital rape clogging up Facebook pages is the Timeline. Why do I need all this shit? Why can’t I have an option? No, sir. Deal with it. And we do. Until another site comes along to simplify things temporarily and Mark Zuckerberg loses some of his “friends”. That site may be Google+, and then Facebook will become Myspace. Speaking of Myspace, what does it look like these da…OH MY GOD GET ME AWAY FROM THERE! What a convoluted mass of advertisements and forcelagged flash bullshit. No wonder no one uses it anymore.

If there were a legitimate point to this sprawling cascade of nonsense, it would be…well, crap, I don’t know. There isn’t really one. Social media, for all its benefits, is kind of wasted on us, and will be as long as we go through the effort of using multiple sites to repost the same things over and over again in an endless circle-jerk motion. There’s no thought involved, we’re almost turning into advertisements for certain sites or memes. Just read it, LOL for a second or two, and shit it out for the next person to see. In an age of convenience and technology, it’s stupefying to see just how far people will go to make things as complex as possible. With that said, pay attention to my Tumblr. and Twitter accounts, and go ahead and add me on Facebook, that way even if you miss Corey’s and Aaron’s posts, or all the activity here at DFF and Midgetspar, I can just repost their posts for you to see J

Oh yeah, and I’m fucking sick of seeing hashtags. What are the point of those things? People use them even outside of Twitter. If I cared enough to read your status, why do I need a summary at the end? Goons!