Weirdly, I watch people wasting their time on such clunky and hard to use services as Facebook and I ask “Why?”. They spend hours and hours of their life filling in silly forms, quizzes or other annoying things all called ‘applications’ and revealing stuff about themselves to each other. They sit there with hundreds of ‘friends’ occasionally blipping out news to each other, or sharing pictures of them being sick at parties.
But, these people are NOT their real friends. These are people they knew a long time ago. There’s a reason why their no longer in touch in their real lives. They hate each other! The only reason they become ‘friends’ on Facebook is to remind themselves why they aren’t friends in real life, or to show off to each other about how good their real life is compared to the other’s real life.
What real life though? They are too busy on Facebook to do anything in their real life. ‘The internet isn’t real, it’s just typing’ (to quote my hero Nick Abbot). Indeed, I was recently pleased to receive this link to an anti-Facebook song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZzP_69ZTFk made by a fellow I once knew. Erm, once knew, but discovered again on Facebook. Ok, ok, yes he’s not my real life friend, but he’s now my Facebook friend. Damn. What have I done? What have I become?
Having said that, I recently watched a real life drama unfold on the internet, and it wasn’t via Facebook. Not a trivial one at all. It was on a message board operated for many years by a broadcasting and broadcasters hero. Soberingly, the chap had a stroke and then some days later he died.
Now, what made real life blur into the internet was that his partner would give daily updates about how he was, what was happening, how she was feeling. She was asking for positive thinking, and so out came the good comments and best wishes in their droves. The board became a get-well-soon card of massive proportions, that she would read to him. Then, on a daily basis she would report on how he was, how she was, and paint a word picture for those of us hanging on and hoping. However, he never recovered properly, and so inevitably she reported his death. Reading the message board as so many of us were, became a roller-coaster of emotional highs and lows. This was real. It was happening. It was intense. And eventually it got worse. He died in real life, but we were watching this reported in cyberspace. The internet reflected his real life. A truly bizarre experience, but one that I expect will be repeated in another place and time again and again.
On a lighter note, pretend dramas have unfolded on the internet, true, and they’ve been addicitive. My favourite (now in its second year) being http://www.hollysinbox.com which is sort of a chick-book (oh dear, must be my feminine side) pretending to be a secret feed of some poor girl’s Inbox at work. It updates in real time and you gradually get to see what’s happening in her (pretend) life. Oh, and it always stops after a few months at a crucial point forcing you to buy the book. Damn, that was good marketing. Erm, I’ve not bought it, honest.
So, I’m wondering how much further this blurring will go. As the scabby urchins blog their pathetic lives, and expose themselves to their ‘Friends’ more and more, chat via their webcams, and suffer withdrawal if they can’t get online, is this just the beginning of a future when we won’t be able to separate reality from cyberspace. Indeed, is that why in real life kids are now as happy to shoot each other as they are on virtual reality games?
England's England 