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The Antisociality of Social Media Part 11: Just Give Us Picture Books Already

Social media has done it again. 

From the ambiguous and uninterpretable meaning of likes to the destruction of civilized language though an overpopulation of 3-4 letter acronyms, punctuation marks and emoticons, we have run the gamut of sorry excuses for words.

Or so I thought.

Allow me to introduce you, dear reader, to the Facebook Sticker. What is a sticker you might ask? It is a quick and dirty mechanism to scare the crap out of the BFF who is on the receiving end of your impersonal, remote, online dialogue, that's what. 

Let me illustrate by defining these new "you can't see me so I am going to try to tell you how I am feeling through creepy cartoonish faces" word stand-ins.

Enjoy. Or not.



 

First we have the standard emotion stickers. From left to right on the top row, you can express that you are happy, L[Y]AO, LOLing, or swooning, apparently. 

On the bottom row you will find the ideal choices to convey that you are ROFL[Y]AO, just realized it is starting to rain, didn't get that joke and are slightly hurt by it, or should not have used baby blue mascara on the day of your BFF's wedding.


 


Here we have options to say that you are not sure about this whole Pince-nez thing; fly, get off my face; you are a Stiller fan; and OMG, the fly just went into my mouth!

 On the second row are your choices to confess your astonishment over the loss of your nose, complete joy over getting your braces off (hits home with me), these glasses are better than the Pince-nez, and that is the last time you will trust the girl who is covering for your regular hair dresser when she is out sick.

 

Now the fun really begins as you express that there is some truth to the whole beer before liquor thing, you'd like to tell four people they are losers--or that you love Glee x 4, again, kiddish amusement over your missing nose and that's what you get for acting out that one seen in A Christmas Story.

You can also tell your correspondent that you are going to sue the surgeon over this whole tonsillectomy debacle, dammit, that fly just won't go away, you are confused by the phantom nose itching you are experiencing, and WTF happened to my pants!






We finish now by providing options to convey that you got duped again by that hair dresser stand-in, but it's not as bad as a blue crew cut; you still don't get that you shouldn't look at a solar eclipse, even with sun glasses; you never learned not to put a whole pack of Big League Chew in your mouth at one time; and no matter how old you get, you cannot resist trying on those goofy, swirly-line glasses found in every amusement park gift shop.

Below that are friendly reminders that you really shouldn't play with staples; go ahead and hold your breath you are not getting your way; no, hot sauce is not for every dish; and gosh darnit, where the F@#% is my nose?

So there you have it, dear reader, just about every message you could hope to communicate in one easy to use suite of creepiness.

What's that famous line from Wizard of Oz? What a word! What a word!

[Maybe I got that last one wrong ;-)]















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