First off the top of the magazine, into the breech and out of the barrel into your frontal lobes, readers(!):

Go see Eagle Eye, it’s excellent. If you’re a follower of internet culture and have played Portal or seen 2001: ASpace  Odyssey, you’ll spend half the movie gasping for air and trying not to scream out ‘There will be delicious cake!’ or ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.’ Nonetheless you will enjoy it immensely.

Second out of the barrel; Yes, I’m back. I was back on Wednesday, in point of fact. I’m not gonna explain why I was gone for so long or any of the other hoo-hah. No one needs that kind of angst clogging up their ‘tubes.

Main article leading in from wacky title!
I was originally going to title this ‘Your Face Is In My Space!’ until I realized where I’d picked up that particular regular expression phrase - a Hot Topic shirt. I scrubbed myself vigorously whilst screaming, as evidence by my kooky title.

So the [Hot] topic at hand.  With this recent bout of Lazarus revival to blogging has come a connection to a Facebook ‘community’ known as ‘A Virtual Blogging Community’. The idea is that contributors and readers are all informed of eachothers activities and read eachothers shit. I know that there is a thing called an ‘RSS’ that works in much the same way, but the problem with that is you have to independantly find the site and then clicky the RSS if you like what you see. The idea behind our Facebook community is that you join the community and get a good dozen or so blogs recommended and forced down your throat.

Of course this has led to the discussion of the merits of Facebook on one of the contributing blogs; Full Metal Sean, my cyborg friend* and fellow blogger. Whilst Sean is a more controlled, reasonable kind of personal I’m just jam packed with vitriol and hyperbole, so I think I should contribute with my personal veiws on social networking sites.
Diatribe away!

Basically the summation of my opinion is this; Facebook/MySpace is popular for two things and two things only (the exceptions to the rule aren’t what is captivating the idiot end of the bell-curve, trust me). The first thing is stalking; the second is attention whoring.

Stalking:
We are by nature curious creatures. However it’s considered rude/creepy to ask people certain things, not matter how much we want or need to know. Along with that it’s ust plain fascinating to know what other people are doing or did whilst you were otherwise occupied. It’s exactly the same reason people (generally women, but also higher intelligence men or the gays) enjoy gossip so much, and can thus sit for hours talking about other people’s business. No doubt your own life is just as interesting to other people, but it’s your life and you find it boring; so you gossip or stalk people on Facebook to alleviate boredom (or possibly to some higher motive; for anti-social people who find themselves in love Facebook/MySpace is an endless treasure trove of voyeuristic substitute for an actual relationship.

Attention Whoring:
Nobody has over 9,000 friends; but that number on your social network page is a huge moral booster and status symbol. So, the popularity rises. Along with that the Facebook/MySpace esperience is an extension of the original MSN/AIM/Online chat craze; the ability to talk to people you know without the pesky realities of body language, tone or obvious intent. It makes saying stupid, offensive or plain attention grabbing things (’I'm soooo depressed, love me!’) a lot easier and removes the possible repercussions. The MySpace and Facebook status and update/bulletin functions are the ideal soap boxes for attention whores; feeling deprived of the fawning love of the people around them, they post something vaguely dramatic like ‘Caitlin is soooo angry at him ><’. This leads to people asking her what’s wrong, who she’s angry at, etc, etc. It spikes their interest in direct correlation with my first point and gives the attention whore a chance to spout idiocy that normally no one would care about.

I dunno, maybe I’m just a raging alcoholic cynical sci-fi author suffering from a bad case of post-modern nihilistic existential mentality BUT the vaunted social aspects of Facebook just don’t appeal to me. I feel the temptation to sit on the damn thing, like I did with myspace until I performed a ‘Delete Fucking Everything!’ attack (It was super effective.) and obsess over photos of other people out together, having fun and smiling for their happy snaps. Something happens to upset me, and I find myself wanting to put an attention seeking status update so that someone will ask me what the matter is. I find myself feeling inadequate; where’s my hundreds of friends and album after album of photos from the good times I’ve had? Haven’t I got any friends? Why isn’t there a litany of comments and personal messages (free to veiw by the public) on my page? Why has it been over an hour since someone last super-poked me? Why am I in none of those photos?

Then I give myself a good shake. I don’t add people I don’t genuinely like or know in real life, leaving me with a bare fifty or so friends & aquaintances on my profile. When I go out, as I regularly do, there’s no photo taking because we’re usually having too much fun and the least of my concerns is ‘Oh! I need a photo of this so that people on the internet can see what a good time I was having!’. If someone has something worth saying to me, they’ll contact me. What the fuck is a super-poke anyway? Why the hell would you do it?

Basically I use social networking sites correctly. That is, it’s a way for people to contact me if all else fails or for people I see on a very irregular basis to keep up with my activities (If they so choose…why they would, I’m unsure, since it’s usually a never ending cycle of ‘drunk’, ‘writing’ and ‘heartbroken’ with a little ‘work, study’ mixed in.) and for me to keep tabs on them if I care enough about them. Even then that’s skirting on the attention whore/stalking aspect. Nonetheless I like to think my actual social life is fairly independant of a website that is basically nothing but an enourmous, wasteful timesink.

So that’s my opinion on Facebook and MySpace. It’s good I suppose if you’re a vapid socialite whose priorities are firmly focused on things that these sites empower but for us lesser mortals it becomes a very tedious exercise in pounding you over the head with your own alleged unpopularity.

Why yes, I am a little bitter and twisted. Doesn’t make me wrong though.

FG.

*Sean and I have known eachother since pre-primary. We were the two naughty boys who were forced to sit in the corner after our latest shenanigans. Later, we went on to try and perform alchemy on a person to bring them back from the dead. The cost was terrible, leading to my entrapment in a suit of armour and Sean’s moniker of ‘Full Metal’.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.