When I joined Facebook four years ago, it was just opening to high school students. At the time, it was a simple communication method that was stripped of the spam and scams that filled MySpace.

Fast forward four years. Facebook has increased exponentially since lowering the standards for who can join: I’m ‘friends’ with my 11-year-old brother and 50-something-year-old father. Alongside the millions of profiles, there are thousands of applications that let you do everything from naming movie quotes to building a virtual farm. This is not the Facebook I joined and I find myself torn between leaving it altogether to escape the clutter, and remaining on it in order to stay connected to my friends.

The ability allowing developers to create programs for Facebook in May 2007 started as a good idea but got old fast, with the number of new applications for quizzes growing each day since.

Facebook has melted into the Internet as a whole, no longer standing on its own. Like on Twitter, users can update their Facebook status simultaneously while broadcasting what they ordered for dinner and what movie they will be watching on Netflix. As of July 2008, practically any Web site can access, monitor and control what you post on your profile thanks to Facebook Connect.

But as much as I cannot stand these sorts of applications, they are not the worst of it. Yesterday, the social media blog Mashable reported that a recent application, Fan Check, may pose a security risk to those who use it. The application, which ranks your friends based on how often they interact with your profile, is said to contain a virus that could infect the user’s Facebook account.

If you see an application link that tells you to ‘become a fan’ of Fan Check, do not click it. If you have the application installed, uninstall it and slap yourself on the wrist for being so desperate as to know who likes you the most. Many other Web sites offer the ability to comment on blogs or post online orders to a user’s Facebook. Frankly, I neither want to let everyone know what movie I’m watching, nor do I particularly care what movies my friends are watching. If it’s possible to have too much information in one place, Facebook has achieved it.

My problem really is not what I post, but having to look at what my friends post. While you can ‘hide’ someone’s information from your news feed, there will always be another person who discovered another quiz with results they cannot wait to share.

I want to use social networks to know what is going on in people’s lives – the good and the bad, or even what is on their mind. But the surplus of information that is flooding Facebook makes it nearly impossible to sort out the unique from the computer-generated. I am finding myself not logging onto Facebook as much because I’m not learning about my friends and their lives, but rather my newsfeed is dominated by a select few who overuse applications and send me bumper stickers for every occasion.

In the middle of last week, I got into a dispute with one of my friends. When I checked Facebook later, I noticed she had un-friended me. All I could do was laugh. Look at us. Look what an oxymoron ‘social’ media is. It’s breaking us apart. Social networking allows us to be passive-aggressive online and enables us to faade our inabilities to deal with real face-to-face interactions.

Between the lack of ‘social’ in social networking and the overflow of applications, I find myself drifting away from Facebook. I’m merely continuing to visit the site out of addictive habit, not curiosity.

Ben Tepfer is single and looking for a nice Jewish girl to be more than his Facebook friend. He is a sophomore television, radio and film major and his technology column appears every Tuesday. He can be reached at bstepfer@syr.edu.

Published on September 7, 2009 at 12:00 pm