Facebook for the 1 Percent
(Associated Press)
Folks, despite being a well-respected journalist at a high-powered news institution, I’m a normal guy at heart. I wake up at 10:15 every morning, just like you, and put my pants on one leg at a time, on the days I put on my pants. I drink Budweiser, eat Hungry Man frozen dinners, and vacation in Daytona Beach, where I get absolutely loaded and dance passionately to the “Cha Cha Slide.”
All of which is why I can’t bring you the inside details on Facebook’s latest app, Mentions. Facebook released Mentions on Thursday, and it’s available in Apple’s App Store. Anyone can download it, but only those who have a Verified checkmark — which designates “well-known public figures … with large followings” — on their Facebook pages can log in and actually use the thing.
This is not an app for you and me; it is an app for fashionistas, reality-show contest winners, and the lead singer of Limp Bizkit. It’s an app for people who can skip the line for Cronuts.
Mentions is designed to help public figures with high follower counts sift through the overwhelming crush of mentions and wall posts they receive every day from the hoi polloi of Facebook. With Mentions, Facebook has become an incubator for a sort of social media Reaganomics: It’s put out an app to entice and benefit its multimillionaire members (that’s “multimillionaire” in terms of followers) and hope that the benefits trickle down to everyone else, us crusty-fingered nobodies who could never even sniff a reservation at The Ivy.
Mere plebeians need not waste their precious bandwidth in even downloading Mentions. You can’t use it. This is the Fred Durst Only zone.
Facebook Mentions: An app for tattooed men who often speak into microphones.
Indeed, on Facebook, we are the 99 percent. If you’re not Jennifer Lawrence, you are missing out on a separate, ritzy Facebook app. If you are Jennifer Lawrence — please call me; I think we could be friends.
The Mentions app isn’t the first special, white-glove feature that Facebook has rolled out to its VIP members. In March 2013, Facebook announced that it was “improving Conversations” by giving select members access to threaded comments sections. In practice, this meant that Facebookers who generally received tons of comments on their posts — Jennifer Lawrence, Fred Durst — would be able to respond individually to each one, a much cleaner method of commenting than the free-for-all that exists for the rest of us.
We pollution-sucking normals, meanwhile, are stuck with the old ham-fisted methods of replying to comments. Let’s say I post a photo of myself from Daytona Beach, twerking on the car from The Dukes of Hazzard. It gets five comments, from friends from various stages in my life.
Do I respond one by one, in separate comments? Do I respond in one large comment, mentioning each commenter by name? Do I respond to certain comments but not others, and risk alienating specific friends?
These are hard choices. Who knew that twerking on the General Lee would come with such consequences?
And, to sound a conspiratorial note: Who knows what other VIP-only features are out there? Does Fred Durst’s Facebook have a “Dislike” button? Do animated GIFs work on Fred Durst’s Facebook? If I’m Fred Durst, do I get to see how many times that cute girl has visited my Facebook profile in the past two weeks?
I mean, really, Facebook: Don’t I spend enough of my life having fewer advantages than Fred Durst? Isn’t the whole point of going online and using social media to escape the indignities of having ended up worse off than Fred Durst?
Does Facebook really need a class system, where Fred Durst is at the top and the rest of us are at the bottom?
Fred Durst is so fancy he has to wear gloves before holding a microphone/logging on to Facebook. (Getty Images)
We’ve put up with a lot from Facebook over the years: the privacy issues, the manipulative social experiments, the ascendancy of the hooded sweatshirt as a male fashion accessory.
Now Facebook is sowing the very seeds of social media stratification. The Verified are awarded special blue checkmarks and special commenting privileges and a bespoke app that the rest of us can’t use; we’re stuck uploading our sun-soaked spring break photos through the workaday app and hoping that only one person comments.
We are the new 99 percent! We may not be Fred Durst or have access to his fancy new Facebook app, but at least we have one another.
