In case you hadn’t heard, people hate the new facebook. If this is news to you, then you don’t have facebook, and therefore don’t exist in real life. Even though your nonexistence is shameful and pathetic, I envy you for not having to read what is essentially the same facebook status posted 200 times in 1 week by 50 different people. They’ve declared the death of the facebooks. All the facebooks.

But before we write off facebook as quickly as we did Lindsay Lohan, think back to a time when facebook didn’t have a feed or status updates. If you don’t remember, then you either didn’t go to college or didn’t go to college in the past decade. Ah, yes, circa 2004: the first Grand Theft Auto with a black male lead, a new Green Day album that you could listen to without being a stoner, the first year in the war for oil, Mean Girls (*omg gay squeal*), and MySpace. ‘Twas a grand olde time. MySpace was huge. In 2005 NewsCorp (Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, Ganonodorf etc.) even paid about $580 million dollars for it because they KNEW this was going to be the future of the internet. They later dumped it for about $35 million.

MySpace was great and everyone loved it. Except that it wasn’t and everyone hated it. Nobody wanted to admit MySpace was a totally creepy concept and was super annoying. Really, if I wanted to search for new friends within 5 miles of my home, I would go outside and talk to them (or if you’re gay and have social anxiety problems you use Grindr). MySpace was like the neighborhood watchdog site where you can put in your address and see all the pedophiles who live in your neighborhood (neat-o!), except with MySpace you could send them messages and (if you’re lucky) get molested/left for dead in a dark alley. Ugh. I miss the Bush era.

But even pedophiles had a reason to hate the ‘Space. Really, how are they supposed to get off to some 12 year old girl’s bikini pics when their computer is about to crash trying to simultaneously load 167 images of Hello Kitty with Bye Bye Bye streaming in the background?! The internet was different back then, kids. Most people didn’t have ultra-efficient macs that run forever and are awesome in bed. We didn’t have the option to purchase different internet speeds based on our income. It was like, you got cable internet, and when more people in your neighborhood got cable internet yours got slower. This is why you told everyone how much cable internet sucks and not to get it because the DSL thing was SO the future. That was how you got all the bandwidth to yourself (my preeecious). Times were tough.

So then Mark Wahlberg invents facebook, right? They were all, like, exclusive and shit. It was only for college students (so if you got a message from some pervert, it was a friend of a friend who was age appropriate, at the very least) with a valid college e-mail address. Better yet? It was only for select colleges (Penn State!) so you weren’t going to have to look at your friends that enrolled in The University of Phoenix every day and get sad. No, this was for the upper echelon of the 18-24 crowd. Your profile wasn’t just some amalgamation of cats, pokemon and Insane Clown Posse. It was an organized, yet personalized, reflection of you. …and all the pictures of drunk you. Because we all know that’s the most accurate portrayal of your college existence. But who cares? Nobody knows it’s you, and even if they did, only your college-age friends can get facebook. This is awesome!!! Vive La Facebook forever!!! Right? RIGHT??? Ugh. You know what happened next.

Facebook got really big really fast. It’s like when Lady GaGa launched her first album and you thought she was totally balls-to-the-walls crazy cool, and you were like “I’m going to a Lady GaGa concert.” People were all like “Lady GaGa? Is she British? I don’t get it.” Then two years later she’s everywhere you turn, putting out mediocre music that’s just enough to get by and stay near the top, and every poser you know is in love with her. Sooo over that bitch. But, anyway, that’s what happened to facebook. First they slowly opened facebook up to more colleges, then all real colleges, then community colleges, then high schools (wtf), and at some point they were just like “fuck it, just let them all in.” So they did.

If that weren’t enough, it got to the point where the major facebook updates seemed like a daily thing: Guess what, facebook user? People can tag you in pictures now so everyone knows that was you throwing up in the litter box! You know what else, facebook user? You have a “like” button now, so you can officially tell the world “I approve of this.” OMG and you know what else?! Now facebook tells EVERYONE whose wall you wrote on, what you liked, who just accepted your friend request, what you posted to your wall, and the last time you took a shit! Isn’t that super cool?!?! Also, your parents are on facebook and they want to be your friend. You can’t reject them because it’ll look super shady. Also, your grandmother. Better untag yourself from that girl-on-girl pic. …no, the other one.

Fast-forward a couple years to the present. facebook sporadically makes minor tweaks here and there. About once a year, they update their privacy policy to let you know what percentage of your life they own, and some douchebag lawyer/World Of Warcraft Mage goes on CNN bitching about it and pretending like he read it. At some point they split the news feed into two separate views: “top stories” (updates facebook thinks are more relevant to you) and “most recent”. Last week, they decided to put both views in the same window *gasp* and place a separate live feed that updates in real-time in the right hand corner. You know, where the ads for gay underwear and pictures of people you don’t know used to be. People find it confusing and/or ugly. Of all the changes to facebook ever, this was the one that did it. People were ranting about it on their facebook updates, twatting about it on twitter, and even yelling about it on cable news. facebook is going down, girlfriend.

But slow down, take your pointer off the “delete account” button, and put the chihuahua down. facebook isn’t the new MySpace. google+ isn’t the new facebook. Why? Because if google+ was going to happen, it would have happened already. google isn’t a social networking pioneer, they just know how to make very profitable business tools. Face it: google isn’t cool and never will be. They’re good at what they do, but google for social networking reeks of nerd. They’re never going to get the attention of Gen Y, which was that catalyst that sparked facebook’s success. Also, facebook isn’t really that bad. Considering I’ve had facebook for the past 7 years, a lot has changed but at the same time nothing has changed. I still don’t get spam or random friend requests from pedophiles like on MySpace, I don’t have to wait for 100 images of Justin Timberlake to load on your page, and it’s still relatively easy to use. Plus, all my friends already have it (since facebook decided to be a whore) and adding them all again on another site sounds incredibly time consuming.

I’m fine with facebook, and if you’re not, then that’s fine. Maybe you can try google+. I hear they opened it up to everyone that wants it. All 4,367 of them.

I’m well aware that CNN is the USA Today of cable news networks (and FOX News is Highlights for Children) but that doesn’t mean I don’t hang on their every word. If CNN won’t scare me about earthquakes, Mexicans, Tea Bagging and West Nile Encephalitis then who will? When homeless people shout about these things I just try to look away and walk faster, but when CNN tweets about a 4.5 magnitude earthquake in the Pacific I run to higher ground in fear of being swept away by a tsunami (even though I live on the east coast and don’t know what a 4.5 magnitude earthquake is.) So naturally, when CNN reports that social media is making us antisocial, I immediately become distressed and get the urge to dial my doctor for Xanax.

It really stresses me out. How will I know if I’m getting antisocial? If I’ve had facebook longer than everyone else does that mean I have a more severe case? Do I really need actual human contact? Why is Anderson Cooper’s T-shirt so tight? Why is Anderson Cooper even wearing a shirt? So many questions (seriously Cooper, at this point you might as well just lose the shirt, it’s win/win) and an uncertain future.

I guess they could always be wrong. Similar outrageous theories have been proposed by the media before. I think back to when the internet started to get really mainstream for Americans (circa 1996-ish?) and remember how we were warned e-mail would drive the U.S. post-office out of business. …Oh. Wait. Nevermind, bad example. How about when they told us that corporations would be able to pinpoint your exact location and market to you exclusively based on your likes and disl- …Oh. That, too? Fuck.

You can’t argue with the fact that social media does make people kinda hateful. You’re drinking Belvedere with Kylie Minogue on a rooftop terrace in Bali? Well guess what: half the people on your facebook are unemployed, underpaid or living in New Jersey. Just because someone hit the “like” button doesn’t mean they aren’t going all Santería on your bougie ass out of spite. Just changed your status to “in a Relationship”? Your single friends (who obv know better) just started a pool to see how long it lasts. Just tweeted about your new Volkswagen? Someone’s going to tell you about how the company is in a tumultuous merger/takeover with Porsche and builds their cars in Mexico so they fall apart after 90 days. …but that one’s true so you should thank them for warning you. You’re welcome.

We may be assholes by nature, but the internet gives us a way to be even bigger assholes without an immediate slap across the face. I thank god every day for Al Gore inventing the internet and Mark Wahlberg inventing facebook.

This has nothing to do with Kurt Russell. I promise. Though that would be a kick-ass (long overdue) sequel.

I don’t recall ever having a need for the word “transient” before living in South Florida. I mean, maybe if I wanted a fancy name for homeless people in center city Philadelphia, but for the most part an unused word lying dormant in my vast vocabulary of mostly four-letter words and brand names. Then I moved to Miami. One of the first things people tell you about Miami (though it’s really applicable to all of South Florida) is “yeah, Miami is really transient.” In other words, not only do people not normally stay here forever, but most of them flee back to wherever they came from so fast you would think botched plastic surgery is contagious.

Miami can be a really cool city, so it might be hard to understand why new residents find the place so toxic they need to pack up and leave after maybe a few months. Downtown Miami is beautiful, adorned with modern skyscrapers and causeways. South Beach is a nonstop party where there’s never a shortage of beautiful people and cars that cost more than most people’s homes. This is all really fun and exciting at first, but at some point that excitement fades away. You realize the beautiful skyscrapers lie empty and tied up in bankruptcy court, that Rolls Royce is a rental, the local government is plagued by daily corruption scandals as if it were a third world country, and that girl only got so skinny because she has a major coke problem (if you’re in Ft. Lauderdale, replace coke with meth).

The aforementioned are all relatively tolerable nuisances, but there’s one factor of life here that tends to be a nail-in-the-coffin. The sheer fact that the majority of people in Miami are just… stupid. Not stupid like ditzy stupid, stupid like stupid stupid. People in Miami either don’t care or don’t understand (leaning towards the latter) what goes on around them unless it’s broadcast on BRAVO TV.

That being said, I think Miami is one of the greatest cities in the world to live in.

Totally bipolar, I know. But hear me out: Everything about living in Miami is difficult if you’re not an heiress and don’t speak Spanish. I’m not and I don’t. Somehow, I managed to get a decent job in South Beach, with a great company, right out of college and in the middle of a recession. It wasn’t easy, and there were definitely times my fridge had more vodka than food (like now), but somehow it worked out. Miami kicked my ass, called me a bitch, and kicked it again. But it forced me to grow up, and brought a lot of awesome people into my life along the way.

Miami is a great place to live for a while or, for a handful of people, for good. So move to Miami, lose your job, get a new one, lose your boyfriend/girlfriend, get a new one, get addicted to cocaine, get a reality TV show where you get clean, become a success. Just don’t get sucked in. Don’t be that burnout who was going somewhere, stopped in South Beach, and got stuck. You don’t want to be that 46 year old server at Rosa Mexicana who dropped out of FIU and still thinks he’s going back. Sure, you’ll be able to afford a semi-nice place at the Flamingo because you don’t have a car or student loans, but you haven’t left South Beach in 20 years. You can’t work as a server when you’re 80, and that $5,000.00 you’ve got in a jar won’t even get you through the first year of retirement (you’re just going to blow it on strippers anyway). Also, you’re getting ashy and you’re caucasian, so maybe you should have worn sunscreen.