The Internet revolution
November 2009
I am ashamed to admit that I have adorned a gimp mask and a full leather body suit and become a Facebook bitch!It took me several years of resistance before I finally caved to the seemingly never-ending pressure from friends and associates to join the latest social networking craze on the wacky world of web.
Seriously, not a week went by where I didn’t have at least one person ask me if I was on Facebook, then ask why I wasn’t on Facebook and tell me I should be on Facebook. One week I had about a dozen people ask me the same question in the space of about one and a half minutes so I eventually came to the conclusion that the only way I was going to get them to shut up was to take down my pants, bend over and give in to the hype.
Now I have to admit that I’m glad I did. Despite the fact that when you first register and log into your account you are presented with a page telling you that you have no friends, I do actually find it quite fun. Even the inevitable friend requests from people I don’t really like isn’t a problem because you can simply ignore them.
When Friends Reunited first came on the scene I was probably one of the only people in the world who didn’t join. My argument at the time was that I had left school several years earlier and made absolutely no effort to keep in touch with old school friends so why in the name of Satan’s rusty ring hole would I want to join a site where the sole purpose is to keep in touch with them? There was a reason why I didn’t keep in touch with these people and now I was being offered a chance to pay for the opportunity to speak to them again. Now let me think about that for a second...
The next craze that came along a few years later was MySpace. This took social Networking to a higher level because not only was it free to use it also allowed Joe Average to become friends with their celebrity heroes, which isn’t really the same as being friends with them is it? It's more like... legalised stalking! Again, not in the slightest bit appealing to me because I think all celebrities should be shot.
The other problem with this idea is there are a lot of strange people out there who don’t have any real friends and spend their entire life masturbating on internet chat rooms. There are people who claim to have ten thousand million billion friends on MySpace but they don’t actually know a single one of them. That kind of defeats the object of social networking in my book. In fact Myspace has become something of a grave yard now and the only people who appear to use it are rubbish bands and porn stars.
When Facebook took over as the new "it" site to be on, everybody I knew was waxing lyrical about it. People even had an answer to my objections about not being in the slightest bit interested in keeping in touch with old school friends by explaining that I could also keep in touch with people I already keep in touch with. Genius!
Communication to these people I see every day has also been simplified. Now instead of sending my mate an email, which will take about ten seconds, I can now log onto Facebook and compose them a message. That person will then receive an email notification that I have sent them a message, they will then need to log onto Facebook to read their message, compose a response to me so that I can get email notification that they have sent me an email and log onto Facebook myself to read it, compose a reply back and give them notification that I have replied... it’s so simple it’s amazing!
Poking is the other really great thing. You can, with the click of a button, virtually assault your friends... and people you don’t know. It would be a bit like me walking up to a random person in the street and prodding them in the chest. They wouldn’t think I was being friendly at all they would think I was rude and probably punch me in the face.
The other brilliant thing is the ability to tag people in photos you have uploaded. Basically this means when you hover over the person, their name appears on the screen. Presumably, this is to remind me who my friends are in case I forget their names. Fantastic.
The status updates are brilliant. You can now tell everybody you know what you are doing or thinking at any given time. What a wonderful idea. The other week I informed all of my friends that I was, at that moment in time, sitting on the toilet curling one out. Innovations like this are what the world needs. Apparently the whole point of Twitter is to keep updating all your friends about your every movement. Tremendous, what will they think of next?
There is, of course, a darker side to the fun and frollicks of the internet. What with Viagra, dial-a-bride Thai lady boys and Austrians with a penchant for kidnapping and locking people in cellars, there are also these internet chat rooms which are full of fat middle aged men shopping for preteen girls and sad teenage boys pretending to be lesbians and spending all their spare time having sex with their computer.
Seriously, what is the point of cyber sex? I mean, how does it work exactly? I can’t imagine typing is the most erotic thing in the world. I’m sitting here tapping away at my keyboard at the moment and am only feeling mildly aroused at best. Surely you need at least one hand to type and one to burp the worm so it can’t be the easiest of things and I don’t even want to imagine what the consequences are for the keyboard... Talk about coming to a sticky end.
Now I know that the Internet was primarily created for the purpose of looking at porn and I personally think that is a wonderful idea. It certainly saves the embarrassment of going down to the local off-license and having to slip a copy of Razzle or Reader's Wives in with your weekly paper and pint of milk but has is life on the Internet information super-bypass made things too easy?
Now we all have the ability to go shopping without leaving the house, have sex without needing another person there, communicate with friends without actually speaking and become an expert on any subject matter just by visiting Wikipedia, life is so much simpler. The internet truly is a marvellous invention.
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