Almost everybody has heard of social networking by now. The basic idea is that you list your friends and they list theirs. All together you make a giant network of first, second, and third tier friends. It’s supposed to let you keep in touch with each other, but lets be frank. All it lets you do is keep in touch with tertiary acquaintances while neglecting true face to face interaction with your real friends.
Take the current popular site facebook. While I applaud the open nature of application development, all it’s really accomplished is the creation of a host of spam creating time wasters. I log onto facebook and what do I see? XXX defeated 1 skier, YYY beat XXX in a race, ZZZ became a zombie…. (WTF???) This is how I should keep in touch with my friends??? By challenging them to virtual skiing matches which you don’t even control? Just like email and IM before it the facebooks and myspaces of the world have simply allowed us to inundate a bunch of people we barely know with useless information that they couldn’t care less about. They’ve replaced the mass bcc emails of moronic videos and pictures (at least these were funny sometimes!).
The average American now has less true friends than ever before. Why? Because of this kind of idiotic shit. And the spam…. oh the spam. Myspace is an especially evil culprit. Apparently all kinds of beautiful women want me to watch their webcams. To be honest, nothing will ever replace speaking to another person face to face, and as technology has improved the actual amount of communication has diminished. At least you can hear specific intonations on the phone. At least you can use smileys and bold and underline words in email and IM. We’ve finally come to the point where we communicate with stock, canned information provided to us by someone else. Don’t even get me started on the semblance of popularity provided by large friend lists.
Corporate America wants to keep us separated from eachother, and we’re letting it happen. Soon you’ll never need to leave your house, and that’s just the way the powers that be want it.
Final verdict. Every social networking site i’ve ever seen is a complete and utter waste of time. Go out and meet your real friends for lunch, dinner, drinks, or a movie.
Posted on March 7th, 2008 by phaedrus
Filed under: general taste, internet
hey buddy i know you. anyone over 30 shouldn’t be on these sites anyways
I recently got a MS comment that said “can’t make it this friday for lunch.” wtf. what if i didn’t check my MS account? I woulda never know I was being flaked on. In an era of text messaging, facebooking, MSing, and crackberry-ing, apparently people don’t have time to make real phone calls anymore.