Living in the so-called 'digital age' it is rather a bothersome task to even attempt to avoid the barrage of technology and futuristic methods of interaction with which we are constantly and unrelentingly attacked daily. As my more faithful readers may have gathered from my previous musings upon the various topics which affect our every day lives in this new, modern era, I am not a man who is particularly tolerant of all the newly thought up aspects of present day survival. I do not, for example, see the use of self-service checkouts, understand entirely why companies believe we will be convinced to purchase their products if they confront us with the most grating adverts in history, and am somewhat baffled by the concept of three dimensional images flashing before me when I pop down to the pictures.
But now it is especially relevant, I feel, to dip into the 'global phenomenon' which 'none can do without'. It can mean only one thing - The Pessimist Chronicles, free from exams and assignments, is back from its mid-season break and is supplement Harriet Baker's earlier article with the return of The Pessimist's Guide to Modern Living. And if there's one thing which really pees me right off, its the modern-day dependence (or, rather, for the rest of humanity, the perceived modern-day dependence) upon the social networking site.
As I sit down to write this article, I am forced to acknowledge that Facebook has been in the forefront of the news somewhat perennially recently. I can't complain about the success of the product. A student named Mark Zuckerberg essentially created a website, and then sat back and let a wealth of a thousand cajillion dollars manifest overnight.
Yes, I'm positive it was that simple; and as someone (hopefully) only one year away from earning the right to print my name on documents as 'William D. Green, BA (Hons)', I pride myself on being a pretty reliable source. In any case, I'm a more reliable source than Greg down the Co-Op who told me how Zuckerberg made his millions (or, rather, cajillions, as we have already established) in the first place.
The success of Facebook, in fact, has finally reached the point where the world's most prominent fat cats finally decided to inject a million bazillion karanillion dollars apiece into this one hundred per cent free-to-use service... and then lost out. So they're a bit angry. And who can blame them?
Where my anger lies, however, is in the obsession the common people appear to have nowadays with these kinds of 'services'. It all started, of course, back in the day, with MySpace (remember MySpace? No, me neither), and it soon moved on to Bebo (who?), some other stuff, and then Facebook, the only one people use anymore.
We are constantly told that we cannot live without logging into Facebook and seeing what's going on with our 'friends' (I use the term in the loose sense Facebook uses it - out of my 282 friends, I can honestly say I only give a damn about a handful, and I would probably cross the street to avoid the rest). Everywhere we go, people naturally assume that everyone in the world has a Facebook account.
Television: 'Enter our competition to win £1000. All you have to do is tell us in which short story Sherlock Holmes tricks the villain into confessing by pretending to be at death's door with a tropical disease.'
Mr. Luddite: ''The Adventure of the Dying Detective'! Yes! I can win!'
Television: 'Simply enter on our Facebook page, because everyone in the world has one.'
Mr. Luddite: 'Poo off.'
These kind of situations, believe it or not, must exist. I know several people, in fact, who have never so much as logged on to Facebook (or any other social networking site for that matter). It is for this reason, naturally, that I got so annoyed with my college during my first year at the University of Winchester:
As would be expected, the collection of one's certificates following the completion and passing of your final exams its quite an important thing for a student. We finally get something which confirms to us, in concrete terms, that our time was in no way wasted and that we have made yet another set of achievements in our academic careers. However, this particular college, no doubt in an effort the save paper (and, in this capitalist world, no doubt money, too) came up with a rather idiotic plan for how to go about distributing these. If it wasn't bad enough that they selfishly took away from us the carnival that was Results Day (an integral part of any student's career), instead replacing it with a system where we merely stayed at home and received our results online with no human contact whatsoever (I could go into the fact that, due to the high level of traffic on the college's site, it was often impossible for many people to see their results until sometimes the late evening, causing a whole day's worrying, panic and anguish, but that would be a different topic altogether, so maybe for a future article), they also decided to announce the procedure for obtaining one's certificates exclusively on Facebook. Now, to an intellectual mind - no, actually, from any kind of common sensical mind, rather - this shows many flaws immediately:
1) Not every student had 'liked' the college's Facebook page.
2) Not every student was aware that the college HAD a Facebook page.
3) Not every student would see the message on the one occasion it was posted online.
4) Most students wouldn't bother to check the college's Facebook page - we were told to check our e-mails often, but no-one said anything about Facebook.
5) Some students didn't even have Facebook.
Unfortunately, the assumption here was that everyone WOULD do all the things listed above, despite this clearly all being a rather unlikely eventuality. For myself, I only saw the certificates were available for collection two or three days before the deadline for collection was. And to top it all off, I was in Winchester with no possibility of returning to Solihull in time to collect them. Luckily, I managed to arrange for my parents to collect them, but it was through sheer luck that I saw the message and then told a couple of my friends who hadn't seen it about it. Furthermore, I know of several people who never got to collect them on time, and to this day don't have them. The reason I go on about thi experience is to emphasise the stupidity of my college in this case - they, like all else in this world, it appears - assumed everyone was a clued up on the Facebook phenomenon as everyone else and, believe it or not, this isn't the case. Some people who have Facebook (prepare for some shock and awe) aren't controlled by it to the extent everyone believes we young people are. In fact, I think it would be very easy for us to go for, say, oh, I don't know, a whole week (or, indeed, possibily more) without being able to access the old Book of Face.
But we'll get to that later.
For now, some more on the world's dependency on Facebook. I believe (and I am sure I am not alone in this) that this has reached the stage where this great capitalist world can benefit from using it as a sort of brainwashing device within which to enslave humanity for its own nefarious purposes. On many occasions have I 'liked' crtain pages because their titles particularly related to me or I found them funny, only to find that, in fact, every one of them was just a outlet for some company/website/thing etc to advertise an litter the homepages of myself and others with the most annoying adverts known to man, the majority of which were quite clearly scams which could be picked up by the naked eye of anyone with half a brain, such as the frequent messages suggesting that you can download a game that hasn't been released yet, get a film that hasn't been made yet or even see a shocking video of Justing Bieber eating a meal with his knife and fork in the wrong hands... simply by completing a survey first! Well, newsflash - Facebook won't know if you've done a survey about penis enlargement therapy or not, so you'll never see these 'amazing' things... sorry.
But, just so you know, here's my top five Facebook groups to avoid if you don't want to get really irritated:
5) On a scale of one to Nigel Thornberry, how smashing are you? - nothing to do with the popular childrens' television character, but instead simply an outlet for spammy advert after spammy advert...
4) Stewe - a Spanish/Puerto Rican/Portugese (I'm not very good at identifying languages I can't speak) page which can't even spell the name of the popular Family Guy character it masquerades as a fan page for correctly. Made even more annoying by the fact that all of the adverts you'll get spammed with are written in a language I can't even speak.
3) We should have listened to the Kaiser Chiefs... they've been predicting this for years! - a somewhat titillating title referencing both the 2011 summer riots in London, Birmingham and elsewhere and the popular Kaiser Chiefs song 'I Predict a Riot' in one clever joke, but that's as far as it goes. The rest is just a constant bombardment of drivel.
2) Feeling lazier than the guy who painted this road - hilarious image, yes. The first time you see it. After that, after about twenty-eight different spammy messages since the early hours of the day, one has to wonder why the person in charge of this page has no friends or other activities to occupy their time...
But the worst of all is...
*drumroll*
1) Nobody Likes a Tory - okay, we don't like the Conservative Party, I get it. Join this group and share you views, however, and you'll just get message after message about how awful this party is. After a while, it makes you almost contemplate supporting censorship laws...
It seems we are well and truly screwed when it comes to the future of interaction, then. We can't even show our agreement with certain statements and causes without opening up for ourselves a whole can of worms/spam. But, remember, we are not all as chained to Facebook as the media makes us believe. Some of us do accept that when a celebrity boats about the millions of friends he or she has on Facebook, there is in fact very little behind her or his statement. How many have they ever met? How many names can they recite. If all I had on Facbeook were my housemates and fellow Pessimist Chroniclers, wouldn't I have more real friends on Facebook than the 'friends' will.i.am has?
Most probably.
After all, who would befriend somebody who uses grammar in such a poor way and can't even pronounce his own first name. It's 'William', love. Trust me, I know.
So, that's where the world has left us with regards social networking. I wouldn't say it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to image this situation arising.
Judge: 'William Dangermouse Green, the court has decided to find out not guilty of the crimes of which you have been accused. Simply 'like' us on Facebook, and we'll let you go.'
Me: 'I can't - Alex White still has my Facebook password.'
Judge: 'Oh... too bad.'
Unpleasent, eh?
Which brings me nicely onto my next point...
A few weeks ago, me and Alex White both partook in a weeklong challenge to completely avoid Facebook. I changed his password and he changed mine. There was no chance of escaping our real lives and entering the virtual world; and, not being at university at the time, we were completely disconnecting from the social world.
At first, for me, things seemed rather difficult. I kept trying to access by Blackberry app, before realising, with a sinking heart, that I couldn't get in. Several thoughts crossed my mind - just think of all the breakups and otherwise that I was completely out of the loop regarding. Alex confided in me early on in the challenge that he did indeed feel left out of the comings and goings of everyday society. Alex, for one, had nothing to stalk (and I pray to God that, whatever he did to displace this desire onto the real world, he remained firmly within the confines of the law). I, on the other hand, was unable to chuckle at Kat Darlington's meme- and internerd-related jokeys, and this made me feel rather saddened. And yet, as the challenge wore on, we felt much better. Alex found it all rather relaxing, he informed me, and saw the whole thing as a nice break. And after the first few days, I even ceased to notice my lack of social networking and, in fact, since I came back online, I haven't been on nearly as much. Additionally, we didn't miss anything at all in the friend world, really. Everything was just as it was when we left (although I did find that Alex had posed as me and asked Simon if he would let me suck on his teat, a vagrant misuse of the non-fraping terms of our agreement and, as such, I am still cooking up a sweet revenge). So, all-in-all, I think that jointly we proved that the modern dependence upon social networking is a fabrication, and a downright psychological one at that: just like we are told we must all love self-service checkouts simply because they are there, people assume that the popularity of Facebook calls for widespread addiction across the globe.
Well, you heard it here first: it doesn't.
In fact, we could all live happily ever after without it. It's a nice addition, and does make contact very easy, but it is by no means a necessity for humanity. Furthermore, with the incredibly unpopular advent of 'timeline' (which, on my birthday, actually made reading all of my message quite a chore - that's right: I had to FIND half of them) and the new idea Facebook have of embedding adverts even within our own profile pages (a truly disgusting thing the Marxist within me cannot abide), I feel the service shall, one day, go the same way as Windows Live Messenger and Bebo, purely through the novelty slowly wearing off naturally over time.
That is, if the lawsuit against Zuckerberg doesn't finish it off first.
Now if only we can convince people to get off Twitter...
William D. Green, in collaboration with Alex White, my partner in the Facebook Challenge.
"It's 'William' Love. Trust me, I know"
ReplyDeleteBEST....LINE....EVER.