25 Minutes of Facebook Fame

Have you been tagged by the “25 Random Things About Me?” phenom on Facebook? If you’re on Facebook, you probably have, and your home page has been cluttered by your friends’ lists, anti-lists and invitations to others to create their own lists. (And if I tagged you in my anti-list, well, I now apologize for prompting you to create your own narrative list of 25+ things about yourself. I swear I didn’t realize I had the power to sarcastically manipulate people through the InterTubes.)

Where did this thing come from? Various media outlets, from Slate to USA Today to Salon are searching for the origins of the 25 Random Facts meme. Global Comment is even offering its own 25 Facts about the 25 Facts list.

I wonder why those of us who are InterWebs savvy often feel compelled to share these lists of things about ourselves. And are we really making a connection? Or is it another odd facet of the “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argument, that we’re really not sharing anything relevant about ourselves through these 25 Facts, we’re just disseminating information? We’re not really sharing in the lives and souls of our friends, but collecting trivia?

I haven’t really learned anything about my friends that I didn’t much know before. And I didn’t reveal much in my anti-list that my friends didn’t know about me. (Well, maybe it did reveal something about my personality when I stated that I learned biblical Greek because I have a mad desire to copy-edit the Gospels. But if you know me, you probably could have guessed that about me already.) But maybe I’m not looking closely enough at these lists. Robert Lanham in his article for Salon found his friends’ 25 Things lists to be full of deeply thoughtful, weepy-inducing slices of their life that he was honored to share in. He said:

That’s the thing about “25 Random Things About Me”: Once you stop being annoyed you realize that, at its best, it’s one of the more compelling — and, yes, even oddly inspiring — wastes of time to hit the Web in years. And let’s cut to the chase. Should we really be complaining about the inanity of this new trend? We’re a nation entertained by lolcats.

So, accuse me of oversharing. Say I’m adding to the problem. But I’ve decided to stop sneering at those who’ve taken the time to share something about their lives. In fact, I’ve decided to post a list of my own. I didn’t join Facebook, after all, to be anonymous, incurious or left alone.

Did you create a 25 Things List? Do you wish you’d been more thoughtful and less random? What would you share if you could do your list again, or do it right the first time?