Popularity

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1 Shrek - Popularity

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If you went to our Visioncast retreat 2 weeks ago, you remember our speaker Tim Bergmann, buddy of mine from college. Well, last month he tells me about a bunch of pictures of himself with these really cool cars. Their church did a fund raiser for poverty and AIDS relief in Africa and someone had the idea of doing a car show.

Here’s one of those pictures… (SLIDE, BULLET)

To see these pictures however, I had to get a Facebook account to go to Tim’s Facebook page which is where he had posted them. How many of you have heard of Facebook? See, I had heard of MYSPACE, but Facebook I didn’t know about until just a few weeks ago.

I said, "Tim I’m a little dubious about getting a Facebook account. Myspace seems to have a lot of inappropriate pop-up ads and sexual overtones." No, he said, Facebook is like a MYSPACE alternative, much cleaner.

OK, so I get a Facebook page to see the cool car pics. And then I get what all the hubbub is about… I mean, it’s addictive. Why? Because it’s all about everyone’s favorite subject: THEMSELVES!

So I sign up… I want to keep this simple, but I have to input all this information about myself, just to see Tim’s pics. And of course, as I was signing up, I didn’t just want him to have a cool pic, so I had to upload my own pic,

So here’s me on Facebook. (BULLET)

Now, don’t we just look like a couple of jetsetters! Ha! If only we posted our annual salaries!

- That’s a 1.2 million dollar McLaren Tim is standing by as if he owns it… (no he didn’t Photoshop himself in.) The owner probably made Tim sign a wavier just to stand that close to it… and

- That’s a rented snowmobile I’m sitting on by my friend’s mountain cabin.

So this is the love/hate thing I have with online communities: they’re fun, but false. I mean, come on, look at these pictures! But I couldn’t stop with just a picture and a name. No, you’ve got to give date of birth, then marriage status… but there you have 29 options:

- in a relationship

- in an OPEN relationship

- single

- engaged

- married OR, my favorite:

- it’s complicated.

- (I thot, could I put married AND it’s complicated??)

Now, some of you are thinking, "What’s the point?” Well, it struck me just how relevant and immediate this all is to issue we’re talking about today of popularity and inner beauty. Think about it.

- You craft this version of yourself to put on display for a bazillion web-users to judge you by.

- Think of how we do this for people we do not know or will never meet

- What is so important about projecting an image into the Ethernet anyhow?

I could understand how addictive it can be, because for the first time for some of us, we have CONTROL over the image others see. I can appear rich, famous, smart, talented, and more moral than I really am. And all this helps us recapture a little thing we all hoped for in Jr and Sr High. It’s a desire that went underground but never really went away and that is, the desire to be POPULAR.

You say, Rick, it’s not about that at all. It’s about sharing ideas and expressing yourself. Well, maybe that too, but I have the visual evidence that it IS about being POPULAR. Check this out:

BULLET – FACEBOOK

Here’s this thing you sign up for on FACEBOOK called, TOP FRIENDS. When I clicked on this, this is the screen that comes up. See these drop down menus – COOL APS and SUPERPOKE. But this word comes up front and center:

POPULARITY

Lets read, “NOBODY lists you as a top friend yet, Rick.” ZERO. Then, I actually get my popularity rated!! They’re going to tell me how popular I am. They have this rating system and my POPULARITY LEVEL officially is:

WALLFLOWER!

If I’m really ambitious, I can go for that next level of popularity – says right here:

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

That’s exciting! I could be a diamond in the rough! I’m wondering, is there anything below WALLFLOWER? – is that like the Pocket Protector level of popularity? Nerd level? But no fear, at the bottom it tells me the easy path out of my WALLFLOWER-NESS:

invite friends to become more popular!

See it’s that simple! Here I was thinking that I had to do things like, be a friend, build relationships, actually talk, listen. Too complicated! Just invite anyone to be a TOP FRIEND and I will be popular!

(BULLET)