h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Recently a few members of message boards I visit have been extolling the virtues of Twitter, Facebook and the like. "This is great" they say. "So and so just acknowledged my joke." So and so is a vaguely remembered singer from a 1970s band. On Twitter, people "follow" celebrities as they record the minutiae of their daily lives. Now, I can understand celebrities doing this, it's a symptom of the fame illness that they have to believe that an invisible mass of people finds them to be Very Important. Twitter lets them quantify the invisible mass I suppose. With Facebook, the number of "friends" you have is the be all and end all. I watched one person who I'd always regarded as a sane, grounded, intelligent woman as she detailed her progress on Facebook by the number of friends she'd accrued. "Whoo-hoo. Two hours and I've got four" was her first post. A few hours later the number had risen to 17, helped I imagine by her posting her excitement on messageboards and encouraging others. It was a bizarre competition.

The whole online phenomena is changing. Over the last ten years, message boards, chatrooms and RPG games have allowed people an escape from daily life, a chance to be someone else. People adopt a persona with a different name, sometimes a signature that shows people how wise & wonderful they are and often an avatar that they feel somehow reflects how they want to be viewed by others. RPG games and environments like Second Life take it further with fantasy avatars that the owner can alter the appearance of and live their online time through. The female characters are always impossibly beautiful and unfeasibly proportioned whilst the males are always ruggedly handsome. It's a fantasy of course and one that would probably be a psychologists pension plan.

But Facebook and the others are different. People post actual photographs of themselves and record the most boring inanities about their lives. Are people really so interested that a housewife from Sidcup has just bought new curtains? Judging by the "Woo-hoos" and other messages of support, it would appear so. Or are they? It seems to me that everybody just goes around in a grand circle, backslapping each other. Every little post has to be acknowledged. It all seems a little false. I'm reminded of the politician's story of how, when he first arrived in the House of Commons, he was chosen by lot to make the first speech after the Queen opened Parliament. This is quite an honour granted to new MPs and can be a nerve-wracking experience but, no matter the quality of the speech, all the other MPs line up to cogratulate the speaker afterwards. Anyway, this chap did his speech, was congratulated by all and sundry and when he returned to his office it was to be greeted by a cascade of faxes saying "Well done". One was particularly effusive and the new MP was quite touched because it came from a respected politician from another party. It used phrases like "resounding success", "impressive rhetoric", "witty repartee" etc. But his heart sank when he looked at the time stamp on the fax and realised it had been sent the night before.

How much of the Facebook Twittering is similarly empty and false?

I belong to Facebook but I don't use It much , some of my real life friends are on it but most people seem to post a bunch of garbage .

I think there's very much two sides to the whole social media thing.

Facebook for example is an extremely useful tool to keep up to date with friends, organise parties (so much easier to set a facebook event than ring round a dozen people) and generally communicate. The flip side of that is of course the banality. People attempt to live some sort of quasi-celebrity lifestyle.

Why does the housewife from Sidcup tell us about her curtains? Because she's got an audience and doesn't have anything more interesting to tell them. And guess what? That audience includes someone pretending to be Dean Gaffney - but if it's the real Dean and he likes her curtains then surely OK magazine will be round to photograph them tomorrow?

Why do all her friends say "woohoo!"? Because if they don't, people won't "whoohoo!" about their new lightswitches, Dean won't take notice and OK will never come round with a camera and a blank cheque.

I'm not a very good "keeping in touch" kind of person, so it's probably inevitable that this kind of thing just bemuses me and passes me by. When I was first investigating t'interweb, I signed up for Friends Reunited. I saw quite a few people there I remembered and it was quite interesting to see just how many have emigrated but the people I might have been tempted to get in touch with weren't there. Every now & again I get a message from someone but I either can't remember who they are or didn't like them 30 years ago so don't see the point in responding.

I take the point about an established social group using Facebook to keep in touch and that actually sounds like a good idea for my rather extended family spread over four continents.

See, when you give Facebook a role, it's useful. When you use Facebook just for the sake of using Facebook, you end up collecting friends, playing pathetic "games" and posting dozens of pictures of your mundane trips to the shops.

Twitter's a bit more difficult to find a use for. I use it because a lot of bloggers that I read as part of my job "Tweet" - but I'll admit that I am following a few other people (Stephen Fry for example) just because I want to see just how interesting people can be with a 140 character limit.

"Not very" seems to be the answer if this is any guide - http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5641893.ece

You mean Facebook isn't just for playing Scrabble and doing jigsaw puzzles?

Ooh - did you say "Scrabble"?

That sums it up SWL. If you're the sort of person that wants to keep tabs on Britney Spears, you'll end up with streams of mindcarp like "I think tiny cars are cute".

Are you running away, or running to join Facebook, SWL?

Scrabble was one of those games we played as a family when I was a kid. An important part of my coming-of-age was being able to beat my mum. I haven't played it in years cos my wife hates it and all the online versions I've found seem to have an American dictionary.

Facebook: good for keeping in touch with old mates (and getting envious when seeing photos of their nights out in Broadstairs), bad for people putting up photos taken in 1989.

Twitter: good for seeing what people like Stephen Fry, Phil Jupitus and, joy of joys, Charlie Brooker are writing, bad for making yourself look a tit by thinking a character from a Tolstoy novel was a composer.

Hey - what do you think of this seeing as how you're a muso-type

http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2009/02/top-20-tracks-r.html

I've just been reduced to a fit of the giggles.

Oh my, We Will Rock You is one of the most glorious things I've ever heard.

It doesn't work on my PC. I checked my sound settings, they are OK.

I view such sites as a form of ego masturbation. It's an artificial social status circle jerk. Mostly anonymous "friending" just to mutually raise each other's quantity of friends. I'll pass. (Also, I feel those sites raise your cyber-insecurity level.)


Here are some excellent examples of the social pitfalls of facebook. (click the "[read more-->]"s to see the actual messages).

http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/category/posted-online/facebook/

Share and enjoy


Also, this weekend I saw a link on digg about facebook changing its terms of service. They've removed one detail that now gives them complete rights to anything you post in perpetuity for any purpose they desire even after you cancel your account.
http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever
(that's a really long url so if it doesn't work, check on consumerist.com for the article).

Oh, and then there's this: http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Facebook_in_Real_Life

Love the BBC3 skit.

Ego masturbation? As Frank n' Furter would say, "A mental mind f...."

BTW... I'm still listening to the Songsmithing vids from the previous link.

I've gotta say, Oasis is majorly improved by the treatment.

I have a Facebook account, because my cousin forcibly signed me up to it. "Facebook is great! You have to join!" She has since left the site.

It is actually useful for keeping in touch with other posters on the CARM messageboard when we've been banned from CARM (which happens with depressing frequency).

I use it very little otherwise, and almost never initiate conversations there.

TRiG.

Ugh... I forgot about this thread...

Guess who is now on facebook.


To be honest, now that I am on facebook I stand by my opinion that it is indeed ego masturbation. I do not however share the usual goal of getting as many 'friends' as I can. I wasn't on facebook more than a week before I was actively contemplating ways to get people to unfriend me.

When I logged on I was anticipating a few people who I knew IRL would link to me and I looked forward to that. What I didn't anticipate was how many people from my motorcycle club would instantly assume I wanted to be their 'friends'. Those that I personally do consider my friends I instantly confirmed. But there are several that I've only briefly met and a few who I seriously do not recognize. I think they are just friends of friends. I'm definitely not going to 'friend' these peoples' children just because we share 'mutual friends' even though facebook constantly suggests that I do so.

The thing about this is I'm an odd bird in my motorcycle club. As you might imagine most of these folks are a rather conservative lot (many border on racist redneck and some cross that border.) I decided to post a few things to test the waters. First I posted a status update stating simply "gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people." I didn't get a single 'whoo hoo' . Then I posted a link to an editorial I read on the Independent website decrying some of the batspit craziness coming from right concerning health care reform. Yep, no positive feedback on that either.

One 'friend' (who I think I might have met IRL once or twice but I doubt I've ever actually spoken to) sent me an 'cause invitation' to view a video. I watched it not knowing what to expect. It was a video version of the urban legend email about the "atheist professor" who dares god to stop this piece of chalk from shattering when he drops it and calls any christians in his class "fools" if they still believe after taking his class.
Since I didn't know if this 'invitation' was in response to my earlier status update or just broadcast to everyone she knew on the assumption that all of her friends are good christians just like she, I wasn't sure how or if I should respond. But the point of the video goes on to admonish those of faith for not standing up for their beliefs when confronted so I felt I should as well. After giving it a lot of thought I decided to be tactful and polite and just replied with a link to the Snopes.com article about the original urban legend that classifies it as highly unlikely such a professor ever existed.

But mostly what I see on facebook is indeed utter banality. I'm daily finding new 'games' and 'pokes' and 'causes', etc. to 'hide'. Oh, and the stupid quizzes. "What character on [tv show] are you?" "What kind of [zombie/biker/vampire/carebear(I'm not making these up)] are you?" "What does your aura say about you?" And then there are the inane status updates about who's picking up their kid from school and what someone had for dinner (no one has new curtains yet, sadly).

Yeah... I don't think I'll last long.


Speaking of longevity however, we're just two weeks away from my tenth HooTooversary.