Phasebook

I wrote a whole article here a couple of days ago, but on reading it I decided it wasn’t very funny, and that it just laboured an obvious point. The point, put much more simply, is that facebook is not a social tool, it is the exact opposite. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the point in it, because I genuinely think it’s a brilliant idea. The original article didn’t really convey that, so I’ve rewritten it.

This is my first, and biggest problem. Since facebook became the cool thing to do, every single time you go anywhere you are constantly interrupted by people wanting to take photos. It’s like people are so desperate to document the fact they went out and had fun that it gets in the way of them actually having fun in the first place.

Problem the second: It devalues friendship, and turns every day life into an American high school. Popularity is now immediately quantifiable.

Person 1: How popular are you?
Person 2: Why I’m 347 friends popular, how about you?
Person 1: Well I’m 472 friends popular, I’m considerably more popular that you!
Person 2: Cock pie!

On one of The Escapist reviews, Yahtzee makes a comment about a fairly simple graphically unimpressive game being fun to play, and follows it up by saying “Fun, remember that? It’s from when games didn’t feel like a second job”. This was of course a reference to games such as World of Warcraft and other life consuming online activities. This is how I feel about facebook, it’s turning socialising into a job, a friend collecting task, not simply spending time with the people you like. Going out used to just be about having fun, if someone got some photos that was nice, but that wasn’t the point of the evening. I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that when they go out now they are surrounded by people who’s number 1 priority of the evening is to get photos for facebook, and I think that’s sad.

I’m approaching the end of my 20’s, and I have barely 10 photos of my entire life up until this point. I don’t regret this for a moment, because I remember the things that I have done with all the magic and detail that the human mind is capable of. Maybe I remember the events in a way that differs from what actually happened, but who cares? I remember them the way I experienced them, and isn’t that better than the reality? A photograph can’t capture a memory, it just captures what happened, which is boring. I spent most of my teens and early 20s in warehouse parties and illegal raves in fields in the middle of nowhere. I spent that time with various different groups of people who I have completely lost touch with, and the majority of whom I don’t even remember the names of. But this doesn’t devalue the experiences I had, because I know I had them, and not having photos of an event doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. More recently I’ve been out with my current group of friends, Jimmy and Mike in particular, and can remember being sat engrossed in conversation for hours. I know this couldn’t happen now, because if those nights had been in the facebook era, those conversations would have been interrupted every few minutes by someone wanting to take a photo.

I am a fairly anti-social person, I am bored of people. Generally nobody does anything to surprise me, and I see through the social veil that people use too easily now. Throughout my life I’ve skipped around different groups of friends from completely different backgrounds with completely different interests. I’ve known a huge variety of people, and after a while you realise that everyone is completely the same. Most people who enjoy going out and socialising will tell you that they enjoy meeting ‘new people’. But for me there is no such thing as a ‘new person’ anymore, there are just different versions of people I have met before.

Consequently I just don’t bother. Socialising for me now is like when they started putting those solid turtles in kinder surprise. You still get the chocolate, but there’s no surprise, and that was really all you were in it for. Now I just stick to the small group of people who I consider to be my closest friends, but I am grateful that the time I did spend socialising wasn’t marred by an obsession with a website that quantified, automated and documented the process of friendship. That seems a bit soulless to me.

So, the original point of this article was to see just how much of a reflection a facebook friendlist was on a persons popularity, and to do that I’m asking people to add my ‘friend’ to their friendlist, so I can see how many he can get. Please click on the link below to do so, if you think about how brilliant this website is, you’ll realise you owe me at least that, and probably a blow job too.

*** Update ***

The cock jugglers at Facebook disabled my account. Apparently Adolf Hitler isn’t welcome on their site. Interestingly, on their front page they are proud to say that it’s free and “anyone” can join. This apparently excludes democratically elected mass murderers, but I suppose that would have ruined the tag line a little. It’s probably a good thing, loads of genuine racists added him as a friend, which was a little creepy.

Anyway, the link below doesn’t work now.