We all have one: the Facebook friend who’s mastered the fine art of the great status update. Everything she writes is so funny, so different, so far beyond “Jane Doe is tired,” or “Jane Doe is on her way home from work,” that when she does falter a bit and write something like, “Stacey Smith can’t decide what to have for lunch,” she still gets a dozen people commenting like drooling superfans:
“What are your choices? We can have a vote!”
“What kind of sandwiches do you like?”
“Tell us, oh please tell us, when you decide!!”
Last week, Maria Puente wrote in USA Today about the rarity of this skill and how people are striving to update better, stronger, and wittier than they ever have before. She talked to college professors, Twitter experts, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow and a guy who created a status-update-rating app, not to mention several Facebook users who are SICK AND TIRED of you and your boring status updates. (Favorite quote: “Some friends — college-educated adults — consistently give lousy updates, such as Got up; went to store; came home; watched TV,” said social worker Sheri Peterson. “Nothing about what kind of store or even what they bought. Was it specialty cheese or incontinence supplies?”)
Having bemoaned my own news feed’s lack of specialty-cheese-related updates, I had to get status update critiques into the book. So Shakespeare, in his “introduction,” prohibits status updates that include the phrase “[Your name here] hates Mondays,” Willy Loman chastises his son Biff for writing updates that “got no personality!” (while accusing his wife of interrupting his comments), and of course James Joyce tries to revolutionize the form. “People in this society are judged by the pithiness and novelty of their status updates,” Shakespeare “writes” in the book. “And, yes, when you ‘comment’ on a friend’s status, we all judge you on that too.”
So now that I’ve written this, oh the pressure for my future updates! But I’ve also learned from this whole book experience, worry about them too much and one day you’ll actually have the thought while doing something–this would make a great status update. Which can only be followed by the day you realize with horror and awe that you’re doing something just so you can tweet it or write it in a status update. Now that’s the mark of the true artist.
UPDATE: Wow. And now a status update may have led to a movie deal.
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