Friday, December 07, 2007

Slightly Less Annoying Than MySpace



Blue something or the other. It's a new social networking site, I think, and I don't intend to go out of my way to find out. Facebook is enough, which I guess is the new Myspace. I don't want to add the "Zombie Application" or the "Happy Flower Application". I took off my Funwall after I could no longer take 17 people bombarding me with Youtube videos every day of a dog who took in an orphaned raccoon as a baby, or some endless video clip of reasons I should grateful I don't live in Darfur. I'm fairly certain I don't need reassurance from well-intentioned people that I should be happy that troops of 12 year-olds armed with machetes aren't breaking down my door to lop my limbs off in a bloody mess and parade my head through the streets like some modern day Thomas Becket. Enough already.

Did you know that the mail service use to run up to 5 times a day in some countries, so people could be bothered to put pen to parchment, slap on a stamp, and write something substantive to their neighbors across town? Now people are strapped up like Tom Cruise in Minority Report with their Ipods and Blackberries so they can write in some cryptic language to text trivial things to half of their wired network. Yeah. TTFN. Do you know you're actually saying tata for now? Have we become a society of gay 19th century socialites? The last time someone said "tata" to me, I'm fairly sure I was 2 years old and was I being admonished for shitting behind the chair in the kitchen.

I know people far more skilled then I have tackled this topic before with much more wit than I, but good lord, IHMD! (I've had my druthers!)

But I'm 34, and maybe getting a little misanthropic with age. Facebook is fun enough, but it's a little like the cyber equivalent of showing up on someone's door step unannounced. I get a notification that some guy I used to work with, never spoke to, and am pretty sure hated my guts, wants to add me to his friend list. Gee. Why didn't you just actually try to be my friend when we worked together 13 years ago? That would have been a hell of a lot simpler.

Why? Because there is something blatantly disingenuous about all this social networking. I used to repeatedly mock former CNN anchor George Bernard Shaw when he asked the former President Bush some 15 years ago whether the Internet would come with a price, the price being the loss of human contact, religion, and maybe our soul. Ok, maybe he was going over the top with the soul comment, but Mr. Shaw foresaw something the rest of us didn't. Funwalls and Zombie applications.

Cordially

Joe

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