Facebook's Douchie Roots

Considering the douchie behavior that takes place on Facebook, I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised by the douchie behavior that inspired and surrounded its creation.

Of course some elements of the Social Network were embellished, like how hot the crowd was at the Phoenix social club parties. But the truthful accounts pulled from The Accidental Billionaires were enough to make me want to delete my own Facebook profile and flee to MySpace -- a site where no one cares where you went to college as long as one of your profile pictures shows you in fishnet stockings.

The first horifying fact in The Social Network was that the precursor to Facebook was FaceMash.com, a site where guys could rank girls at Harvard in a hot or not fashion -- a last minute adjustment to Zuckerberg's original idea which was to compare them to farm animals. The second being that the beefy Doublemint, Winklevoss twins that conceived the "original" idea of Facebook, really wanted to create a social networking site called the Harvard Connection--an online version of the pretentious social clubs that help these guys rest on their ivy league laurels to get laid. Unfortunately although Facebook has evolved, some of these douchie principles still apply. For example: if you go to a top college you are some how more boneable to the rest of the dating world.

My favorite internet scholar and girl-crush Danah Boyd does a brainy job talking about how class divides play out in social networks saying that the ivy league roots of Facebook create an online class divide. She argues that in addition to the invite-only beginnings of the site even the aesthetic appeals more to a "straight-laced" college bound type with MySpace being a place where artistic, Goth and offbeat young people might flock -- and I don't think she could be more spot on. Facebook stresses what we are, not who we are and leads with where we work, what school we went to and who we know. Kind of like a bad date that starts like an interview.