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When is the Quit Being Stupid Day?

So, May 31st has apparently been ‘declared’ the Quit Facebook Day. Wonder if they have a Facebook page (They do. With thousands of fans. Ah, the sweet irony … but anyway.)

Now, we’re no Facebook fanboys. In fact, we don’t even have a page of our own yet. Partly because we don’t see any great benefit at this point, and partly because we’re busy doing some actual work.

However, we do individually spend tons of time over there, keep up with the much-maligned changes and Open Graph thingies, and even occasionally develop applications on it. And everyone seems to think it’s fun, right?

Apparently not. It seems that Facebook has suddenly become all evil and taken over all our embarrassing pictures and not-so-wise status updates. So, horror of horrors, anyone who cares to search for the said embarrassing pictures will find them! It’s the end of civilization as we know it! We must burn down the ugly, slyly slithering, blue-white page.

Or. We could try not putting up the embarrassing pictures up. ‘Oh, but what if we don’t put them up, but other people tag us in embarrassing pictures, then what?’, some might say. Well, even better: let’s not get embarrassing pictures taken in the first place. And if you are the kind of person who lets people write ‘witty’ tit-bits with markers on your torso and go around flashing it in bars, be proud of who you are. And if you still want to share the love with all your friends, may we suggest … e-mailing them?

And it’s not just about facebook. People love googling other people (second only to googling themselves – and the video below shows how to use that to your advantage with sheer brilliance). The search fields can change but the inherent voyeuristic nature won’t. So if you’re consciously putting things online which you don’t want people to see, stop now.

But the bigger issue here, we think, is the self-importance we attach to ourselves. Seriously, we doubt anybody’s out there searching desperately to find incriminating material to ridicule you. And if someone really is, you may have a bigger problem on your hands anyway.

How to use elementary human (or esp. advertising-CD) behaviour to your advantage. Simply brilliant.