Facebook turns fads evil

I’m sure you’ve noticed this past week that most of your friends on Facebook have changed their profile picture. Many of my friends have posted a photo of a celebrity as their profile picture claiming that it is their celebrity “doppleganger.” For the last few days, people across the globe have been spending hour upon hour trying to figure out what famous person they most look like, or more truthfully, who they wish they looked like.
To be totally honest, I must admit that I too have been a part of this. I am a functioning member of the guilty celebrity doppleganger party. However, the purpose of this article isn’t to speak against Facebook or our generation’s ever increasing narcissism. Although I do find it annoying that everyone online is insisting that they resemble a celebrity that is 10 times more attractive than them, what I am more concerned with is that in all this lookalike excitement, the meaning and beliefs behind what a true doppleganger is have been misunderstood.
With a quick Google search on dopplegangers, I have found that the true definition of a doppleganger is not as whimsical as we Facebookers may have thought.
According to Webster’s Dictionary, a doppleganger is the “ghostly counterpart of a living person.” This German word literally means “double goer” and can be used more colloquially to describe a person that has an uncanny resemblance to someone else. However, this term also has a deep history with many superstitions attached to it. According to different myths, the result of meeting your own doppleganger ranges from bad luck to imminent death. Some legends say that dopplegangers are actually people and others believe they are shadows that are sometimes seen.
Dopplegangers have been used in horror fiction by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allen Poe as a literary device to represent something sinister or evil.
If this isn’t enough to convince you that dopplegangers aren’t as fun as we thought they were, in 1993 Drew Barrymore starred in a movie called “Doppleganger (The Evil Within).” This thriller involves murder, seduction and unexpected twist at the end. Not only does this film look terrible, it also sheds further light on dopplegangers’ potential evil.
Now that the truth about dopplegangers has been made more public, I hope that Facebook
feigns will begin to recognize that dopplegangers are nothing to mess around with and start to take down their famous wannabe profile pictures. Let this be a lesson to all of us. I urge you to research and find out what is really behind the latest Facebook fad before you become a part of it