Social Not-working

Having never been a big fan of sitting in front of the telly for hours on end, I can’t understand my fascination with the internet. It’s the new force feeder of society and we’re the Fois Gras of media consumers. Bombarded with shiny meaningless bullshit until we kark it, stuffed to the brim with propaganda, having lived to eat it up with no questions asked. We had our doubts, but we were too bloated from the unremitting feast to voice them.

One click on Google reader and a backlog of unread blogs scrolls before my eyes; everything from friends travels round the world, to wine, the environment and fashion. It’s too much to appreciate in that instant, but I trawl through it anyway feeling as though I’ll miss something if I don’t . Then one more click, invariably regrettable, and the hideous orgy of voyeurism that is Facebook is open on my screen. I know in an instant what my (modest by today’s standards) 105 friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking and lamenting. I shut it down after each depressing dip into other people’s lives wondering why we are so keen to advertise every aspect of ourselves in that way.

The irony is this isn’t information I need or even care about. What I need to know is the syllabus of my Business of Magazines exam, which is now less than 10 days away and still no less of a mystery to me than it was before. I have been seriously considering extricating myself from the shackles of social networking, but I can’t crack the lock. I keep telling myself that I’ll lose touch with people if I close my account, but I know that’s not it. Sadly, it’s that existing in cyber-space validates me. I’ve lost, along with the rest of the social not-working generation, the ability to value my existence without publicly displaying it.

No longer do we have friends in the traditional sense, now the term “friend” applies to anyone that has taken the time to click “add” or “accept” on a Facebook profile. It’s leading me to question my whole understanding of the concept of friendship. Partially because I’ve always been a little hung-up on it anyway. I’ve always felt conscious that I have a tendency to be transient in the groups of people I spend time with. I spend my time in a number of cliques that are composed of people that were well-established friends long before I made an appearance, and for some reason I have never been there from the beginning.

I have never found history with people has particularly glued me to them. If someone’s company stops being appealing, or they reveal an unattractive side to their character, I terminate the friendship quite overtly. I guess I am just not that adhesive. I have found that the accumulation of “friends” on Facebook makes me just as uncomfortable as tolerating friends that drain me. Since subscribing to the evils of Facebook I have instigated regular contact culls, retaining only those that I genuinely like on my list of Facebook friends. Despite this though, it’s not sitting comfortably with me.

I had a bit of a spate of “adding” people recently. It has unsettled me. Prior to that, I was a firm believer in only accepting invitations from people I like, but never adding anyone. In all honesty, I’m not certain of why that was. It may have been that being requested as a friend by people that I had deliberately avoided in the real world made me so furious I couldn’t bare the thought that I might inadvertently be seen as doing the same the thing. Lately though, I have realised that all of that was a manifestation of my own social hang-ups, Facebook just aggravates them.