If you're reading this, you're probably a member of a social network. I'm a member of several, and do you know what? I hate it.
I have a smartphone, so I can check my Facebook, my Twitter and my Blogs anywhere I like. I cn evn typ lyk dis. And it drives me to distraction. A distraction that is so profound, it would make me check my emails while on the cusp of being gobbed off by HRH Queen Elizabeth I. It might not be nice (I've not read any account of her skill in the gobbing of the off) but it certainly is noteworthy, considering her apparent death, my necrophiliac act would put her in the active role.) Heaven forbid she desires an anal reaming if my crops are ready for harvesting.
Even the term "social networking" is horribly cold. It makes the idea of friendships seem as though they have to be of use. They often aren't, like all good things. What practical use is there to the most beautiful piece of art? Not a lot.
I recently moved house, and my dear ACREs offered the kindest help and support, they were there for me, to help, in an affectionate and practical way. But friendships aren't about what's practical. I wouldn't have many friends if I only wanted to socialise with them in a purely practical means.
But then, you could argue that we we've evolved friendships for practical reason, which have their origins in the practicalities of there being safety in numbers etc.
I suppose one of my biggest bugbears in terms of Social Networking is that it is a compulsive activity. I'm of an age now, where it doesn't really bother me how many people I have on my facebook (although I am curiously antsy about my twitter followers). But then, on my newsfeed, I see people who have over a thousand friends and counting, some of whom they cannot possibly know in real life, because they have never been to Brazil and, so, could not have met Shanka Boomass.
It's a stage for the desperate : "like this if you want me to rate you out of 10". And a stage for the mawkish: " This random "issue" affects thousands of people. "issue" is not acceptable to talk about in public, unlike cancer. Post this as your status, even if it's just for an hour, to show your support of this "issue". I know 97% of you won't, be one of the 3% with the courage to speak out against/for "issue"."
I hate them. I really do, I hate them, more than I can express in words, because it can only be expressed in faecal finger paintings. What hurts more is that some of the people who post this gutter wank are friends. Not Facebook friends, which is the equivalent now of just being on nodding terms, or less, but honest to goodness give-me-a-cwtsh-you-big-pile-of-lovely-friends. It's worse than watching them die, reading these status updates, it really is, because reading this means that you've let them in. You've let the horrible little cunt demons into your lives and that's worse than giving Dracula the okay to go down on your when you've got your period, worse than buying a Twilight Saga novel.
The worst thing is, undoubtedly, the fact that I am in the thrall of the social network phenomenon. The fact that I am able to communicate with distant relatives, almost forgotten friends and school acquaintances, is a glorious side effect of this phenomenon. The unfortunate sputum which it occasionally spews out is, like any other living thing that spreads, an unfortunate by-product; waste.
I hate social networking, isn't it wonderful.
*****
Human Interaction Devoid of Real Context
I’m going to narrow this topic down to Facebook, because myspace is now a music website and I am no good at twitter.
Social networking is all things to all people; this is my broad, vague theory. Some people believe it is for noting their every movement, some believe it is for posting sexy pictures of themselves, some believe it is for plugging their gigs/blogs/videos/podcasts/business/products/etceteras, some believe it is for eulogising the dead, some believe it is for farming, some believe it is evil. They are all correct.
Social networking is the spectrum of human interaction rendered in digital form. It is human interaction devoid of real context, which enables people to interact near-autistically, freed from the constraint of manner and socially recognised appropriate behaviour. Most people are au fait with this for the most part, a quick glance at my most recent news feed shows a plug for a cancer charity, a video of a BBC Jimi Hendrix session, someone thanking their friends for birthday messages, an uploaded picture of a psychotic-looking iguana named Penny, and someone who’s posted her entire night’s plans for all to see, enabling them to conveniently set an ambush for her. All fairly innocuous, though when you log on wanting attention, it is dispiriting to simply find a stream of people peacocking in much the same way you did the last time you were on there, leaving forced witticisms and chirpy open-ended eagerness in the hopes that people will come on board the comment train.
The main problem, as I see it, with social networking is the same problem to be had by instant messaging. This form of communication is far removed from what I will refer to as full interaction; the face to face, all-nuance and gurning meat, the classic old-school style of actually talking to someone. It is widely accepted that a large proportion of our interaction is interpreted through body language, to say nothing of the inflection and tone when speaking, all of which is lost through internet/purely text based communication. It is possible to write in a very colourful, engaging, descriptive way, it is not a foregone conclusion that shades of subtlety will be lost when communicating textually. But so few of us are writers, so few of us have the verbosity, the written skills that can be summoned off-the-cuff to flavour a running text-based conversation in a way which doesn’t fall short of what could be managed face to face. Obviously, I am a writer, and I do have the peerless ability to pour forth beautiful text conversation, but that just succeeds in accentuating my frustration with the paucity of everyone else’s capabilities. I know it’s not their fault they aren’t as brilliant as myself, but some amount of nuisance creeps in nevertheless.
Ironic arrogant hyperbole aside, the amount of confusion, misunderstanding and misinference that occurs due to the ambiguity of how text communication can be interpreted is a right royal pain in the arsehole and no fucking mistake. When arguments occur in the social networking arena, you are even denied the cathartic shouting match that would give the pathetic disagreement a degree of drama in the real world. This was fine back in the day when computer monitors were great big hefty devices, and you could launch a solid, rewarding headbutt on one, but now in the era of the flatscreen and the laptop such outbursts are far too financially taxing.
At the time of writing I have 324 friends on Facebook. These range from people I knew from school, comedians I met on the stand-up circuit, colleagues and people met briefly on random nights out. I perhaps communicate with 7 of them with any regularity, and only 3 of them with any depth. These are the same 3 people I will often see in person. And in fact, the same 3 people whose words appear on this blog. I would suggest this says more about my social interactions rather than the medium of social networking per se, but I think it certainly amplifies my habits, or perhaps the right phrase would be that it concentrates them.
Very few who use Facebook with any regularity will have fewer than, at the very least, 100 friends, and perhaps this is an outcome of a generation who grew up aspiring to be Pokemon masters, intent on catching them all. Facebook isn’t used to chat to your friends, it is used to keep track of them, like a nosy bastard peering over the garden fence. As they say, keep your friends close, and your enemies on Facebook.
It is ridiculous to what extent you can actually keep track of people using social networking. There are acquaintances I haven't seen since school whose day to day lives I am familiar with because of it, which, again, can be a good or a bad thing. In most cases it would be considered inappropriate and downright intrusive to have such a clear view into people's lives. So why isn't it online? Because they let us see it. They put it up for us to see. So have I. You probably have as well. This is the same reason we don’t feel weird scrolling through the 1000+ photos of those people we knew in school but haven't seen for years: it's because they put the pictures up there themselves, and allowed us access to them, wittingly or not.
I have genuinely mixed feelings about social networking. In writing this piece I toyed with the idea of closing my accounts a couple of times. Logging in and goggling down the newsfeed has become an unrewarding digital tic of mine. I'm not really reading the messages, I don't really know the people on there, and for the most part I won't in any way interact with what they post. And if I did I'd end up fussing over whether my comment was appropriate or not, whether they would understand where I was coming from.
The problem with social networking is that it isn't inherently good or bad. Nothing really is. It is an ever-changing chameleon beast; it can be a torrent of jokes, banal updates, bullying, publicly inappropriate photos, links, plugs, self-promotion, publicly inappropriate soppy love messages, publicly inappropriate arguments, empty token 'happy birthdays', arbitrary lying lols or infinitely unfolding comment pile-ups which result in an infinitely filled e-mail inbox notifications.
Social networking is too big a beast to fully get hold of, it wriggles and jiggles and shiggles all over the shop, depending which of the chimpanzees happens to be at the typewriter at that moment. Once you're connected, it's much harder to disconnect. Much like life, I often find social networking a largely unrewarding habit in which patience is occasionally rewarded with something pleasing, amusing or of interest, but those instances require a lot of sifting through valueless brown water.
I think I must just hate people. Or dislike them, at the very least. And with social networking, rather than in actual interaction on the physical plane, I can be playing a game and watching a show instead of listening to people. But even then it can drag you back in. In person, randomly chosen acquaintance A has no knowledge of Jon Irenicus, more fool them, but on Facebook there are a million Irenicus groups to choose from; "Like if you remember this banished elven cunt" (picture of Jon Irenicus), "Jon Irenicus is a mad cunt" or the spot on "Jon Irenicus is NOT a top fucking guy".
Of course none of those groups exist, but the point I was making still stands. My life is empty, and while social networking is not singularly to blame, it isn't fucking helping. I'm going for a sleep and complete life re-evaluation.
*****
Anti-Social Networking
And we never saw him again. Amen. It has become apparent to me that there is a rather strange phenomenon happening and it has spread all across the world. Is seems that 75 million people woke one morning with a book stuck to their face. A face book if you will. And the problem is that there seems to be no way of getting it off. Many have tried and at first glance have succeeded but on stepping near a book the pull is just too strong and the host is once again nose deep in the parasitic pages of this anti-social network. (I know I’ve started strong and I too am wondering where I go from here. We will have to wait and see.)
There was once a time when the act of being social involved physical interaction with another human being (or farm yard animal, if that was your preference) and it usually happened in public or by means of inviting an individual or group of people to a specific place for a specific purpose. An example of this would be going to the pub and enjoying drinks and snacks with people of similar interests to yourself (or friends if you had any) and chatting about subjects worthy of conversation. Networking was the act of connecting yourself to as many people as you could by means of the people you already knew, in the hope that these connections would one day become beneficial. An example of this would be knowing someone who knew Pat Sharp, so that you could possibly ask the blonde twins from Fun House out for drinks (or getting a job, whatever is your top priority). When these two acts were combined the result was Social Networking, going to pubs to meet new people. A rather amazing concept that seemed to be the way forward for people who would rather be someone else, in as few steps as possible. So something that was originally popularised by the ‘yuppies’ of the 70’s and 80’s was now the norm for everyone, from the unemployed working class (ironic?) to the overpriced actor types.
But as with all things technology came along and ruined it (religion, books, Star Wars). With the invention of the modern mobile phone came the dawn of a new era in social networking. The text message gave its users the ability to communicate in short bursts without exerting any amount of energy (say goodbye to Morse code and smoke signals). So instead of doing business over steak, it was done over SMS (stupid meaningless sentences). Networking had gotten so easy that you could literally get in touch with anyone without leaving your bed in the morning. The problem was that this wasn’t social. At all. Not one bit. So after texting back and forth for weeks at a time, when people had to meet up in the material realm they would awkwardly make small talk while trying not to make eye contact with each other. They had become unable to communicate using the gaping maw on the front of their faces, choosing instead to type messages on their phones and pass it to one another. Many sought a solution to the problem. The Japanese created the Wii with the intention of bringing people together and getting them to use their bodies once more. They appeared to be making headway but have sadly drawn in the wrong crowd (OAPs, paedophiles and juvenile delinquents) and so the social networkers continued to party with their palms (dirty little bastards).
Now, phones are all well and good but somewhere along the line people decided that occasionally a message needed to be longer than the 160 character limit. Maybe they needed to show someone a picture that was bigger than 2MB. They could always just go somewhere to do all this, right? But out in the fresh air where the clouds live? And the trees and grass and roads and cars too? No. Better to stay away from all that, just in case they bump into someone for whom the message was not intended. So how would it be possible?
Well, some clever fucker (WARNING: swear words) came up with the idea of connecting every single person (not single in terms of relationship status, them things been around since the introduction of VHS) alive by means of online profiles linking with one another through the people you know. Sound familiar? Ye, look back at paragraph two. See, there it is. We were networking once more and quite efficiently too. It was the age of Internet-working (clever, aint it. I took internet and networking and made a big word). Several sites came into existence offering similar services with the front runner being a web place where people could make a space for themselves and decorate it with wallpapers and pictures of things that they liked. Then people could find them online and add them as friends, opening possibilities for finding more friends. If an individual had needed to say something they could leave messages for certain people to read at their leisure. But these early models also had some major downsides. Security was never very tight and this gave rise to stalking and bullying (or character building as I’ve always seen it). Some people would also use it for less than savoury purposes (shiny blue medals by Christ, skin the cunting lot of them) as it only required an email account to set up. So the idea was sound but it needed tweaking in order to make it work. The people of Internetland and Webville were crying out for more. More information, more options, more fun.
Enter the Jew. Or was it those two other guys? Were they Jews? I don’t know. So some kid comes up with an idea. What if you could be friends with all of your friends? But wasn’t that the other idea, the one that I just mentioned? Ye, it was. But he made it better. Much better. Imagine there was a group for everything you could possibly be interested in and you could see everyone else who likes the same thing. Imagine you have a photo and in that photo are people you know (hopefully) and you want them to know about their presence in the photo. Imagine you want to write a short notice to inform all people of the world that you have taken an incredibly pungent bowel catastrophe and that your one story abode is now also pungent. This kid thought of it all. Between tagging, poking, status updates and pirate parties there was now very little you could do in real life that can’t be done online. Granted, sometimes because you can do something online doesn’t mean you should (to all the wankers of Chatroulette) and this website encourages the invitation of human being to do human things in human constructs.
And so we come full circle because as efficient and effectively as Social Networking is when you don’t need to be social, nothing has ever beaten nor will it ever beat someone buying you a pint (and not through an app smart arse. I mean some people can be such pricks sometimes). Unless they buy you a half then blow you. Good night.
*****
Social Networking
Sorry, that’s a boring title so I improvised and went with this:
Sor-Siahl Nett: War King
Immortality breeds tedium. Sor-Siahl sat on his throne to look back on his impossibly long life and glower at the path that brought him here.
Born into a life of servitude, Sor-Schwamm Nett killed his way towards the job of the most powerful king of the world’s manservant. King Mallethacorr; Slayer of snobs was suspicious at deaths of his 193 previous manservants but he had a good feeling about young Sor-Schwamm. They got on like two best friends in a teen film. They had sex at the same time with different women (always sisters) to see who came first. They had fun. One thankful night they played their naughty, stupid game and fell in love. They decided that for one time, they wouldn’t kill their sibling prostitutes. Not this time.
The downfall of keeping prostitutes alive is that they have a tendency to grow babies. And baby grow they did. The seven months of pregnancy was tough for king and servant as King got treated as a servant and Sor-Schwamm got treated as a slave. It is said that the nights of those seven months, sibling prostitutes ceased to exist as they were all murdered. Sisters and brothers alike.
The early hours of birth were very stressful for the king and servant, as the siblings were twins and while the duo watched as the babies entered this world, the passages are identical, which was the main focus in the baby-head-blood-fanny part of pregnancy. The focus was short, however, as every parent fainted.
Many hours later the new fathers simultaneously woke, rubbed their eyes and then gazed at their new born child. They knew whose was which instantly. The eyes. The smile. The adorable twitching. The problem was that they were both staring at the same infant. Simultaneously, as was their nature, they both attempted to pick up their son. They realised their dilemma and aimed to solve it by turn based fist fighting. The kings superior gloves which were injected with raw fire power, knocked Sor-Schwamm out in eleven punches.
To add to the humiliation, Sor-Schwamm was executed on the charge of having unattractive genes and a stupid face. (The attractive baby was in fact the kings and Sor-Schwamm was a greedy bugger.)
And so “twins” were born with different sir names. As the king was stubborn, he named the children after their fathers to see which would become the most better one of the two. (I wrote most better on purpose.)
I’m not quite sure why I have presented these facts. Sor-Siahl Nett wouldn’t have known any of it. What he did remember and pondered back on was having a very competitive upbringing, failing at every end to beat his superior brother at the strange sports their father, the king placed for them. When they were 18 they were set a challenge to earn their statuses as men.
The king of snobs did not make it easy. In fact, the rumour is that he just wanted the house to himself for a couple of months so he sent the siblings away on a stupid challenge.
He sent them to seek for the Holy Grail itself. The chalice of eternal life. The goblet of ever-living. The cup of the invincibility cheat.
This journey started slow. The duo leaped across half the world chatting to passers by and trying to get into some ladies beds (strictly for sex). They also set practical jokes on each other and it was really hilarious. One time Sor-Siahl placed a milk snake on the winky of the true prince after he had sex and in his worry he killed the entire whore house. What a yarn.
Now that they both agreed to put sex and japes aside, their mission was keen in mind and they homed in on the grail like a heat seeking missile but for expensive receptacles.
One year after their journey began they received a templar tip that it was in a certain cave somewhere in the crevices of the crust of planet earth. I can’t give co-ordinates because id have a row and probably get killed for divulging such delicate information. What I will tell you, though, is that the tip off was right and they both found and stared at the Grail.
Where Sor-Siahl was bested in the sporting challenges set by their dad he had a keen intellect and used it skilfully. He had the silver tongue of a silver humanoid robot and he could convince the knickers off of any unsuspecting character.
“I should check to see if this is in fact the Grail, brother. I wouldn’t want this to kill you.” insisted Sor-Siahl.
The prince didn’t see the sense in possibly dying so he let Sor-Siahl take a sip.
That was the prince’s final mistake. All the times he had humiliated Sor-Siahl now seemed in retrospect a pretty bad idea. As Sor-Siahl took a drink to immortality, he killed his unofficial sibling. Sor-Siahl is now to be the king.
He went home and killed his dad and ruled his kingdom with an iron fist. He set out to fight the world and own it in his immortal majesty. He basically won all the time because he couldn’t die.
This eventually got tiresome for him and he decided to become the administrator of the worlds wars, organising fierce global battles for years and years.
As you can imagine this job got very tedious. He found that now, war wasn’t the frightening as it used to be. People of all cultures had now developed breeding for such acts. Wars were left for solders and so then all the trauma that came with the fierce fighting was left, again with the soldiers.
He had to find a way to enforce fear and despair to the people who were pussying out of the real hard work.
His intelligence and wisdom came through like an immigrant. He realised that these non-fighting people spend a hell of a lot of their leisure time on computers. He thought long and fast and came up with a way for people to put themselves on the line. He created a place where people would put pictures of themselves in all sorts of situations. A place where people could pass comment on everything that they see or do. A place that even improved the productivity of the paparazzi. This place was his source of inside information to the world. It was thusly named “Inter-Nett.”. Under the guise of friendship he had made a place where people could join together and constantly talk to people they have only met once and be social. After his surname this practice was called Nett-working, which quickly got shortened to networking. Then that quickly got lengthened to social networking.
With this he had grown a very unique and specific army. An army that would bait a normal pacifist into a fighter. An army that can pick out the simplest harmless piece of work on the internet and call it “gay” or “shit”. He had raised a Troll army.
Sor-Siahl Nett is one wise, conniving mo-fo who will make sure that every human being will get into a war whether they have the breeding for it or not.
You can argue that the internet is one of the most useful creations contributing to the intellect of the human race but I assure you this: It was created to ensure the downfall of the human race. And it is succeeding for one reason only. Social networking, or Sor-Siahl Nett: War King.
*****
Gethin Down
Adam Gilder
Luke Sampson
Dafydd Evans
