More Stupid Than the Others

Oh I love it when I take the time to read some things that I haven’t had time for in a very long while.

I wrote this post about being a really angry person sometimes. I got a bit fed up with some people posing as nice persons online and concentrating their whole existence into a social networking page of choice:

“…people that concentrate their whole existence into an on-line account like a facebook/myspace/last.fm/twitter/etc. page. This is so sad, you have no idea. I’ve introduced someone to Facebook a while ago and now she can’t get off it. Updating your status every 3 minutes and telling the whole world what you’re doing while having zilch friends outside of it is very, very sad. If you’re a man then you still have a chance to grow up. If you’re a woman then…well…sorry! Bonus points awarded if you’re over 23 as in finished with uni and still hooked on to any of the above. More bonus points awarded if you don’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend and spend your Friday/Saturday nights on the internet. People that start shaking if they don’t have an internet connection when they’re at a party or still furiously check their phone for network coverage, wi-fi or anything else. People that live their hangovers on the web or on IM. No one cares! Give yourself a slap and picture yourself seeing a psychologist saying ‘doctor, my friend from Cambodia had no internet for a week…I felt so bad for him!’ and imagine the look on his face. Then rethink what you are doing! And give yourself another slap.

Just after I wrote that I read an interesting post over at Beyond Madison Avenue: “Social Media is only Social if You’re Alone“and I couldn’t agree more with it. I love what social media is and does, it’s fantastic in that respect but its long tail means there will always be obsessives and extreme loners on it as well - a tiny proportion but enough of them anyway:

These sites are ideal for the sort of audience whose social life is of paramount importance, whose lives revolve around their friends and going out, and who’d rather not be interacting with the people around them (e.g. their roommates and/or parents.)If indeed there are actually any people around them.

Now I realize that when you are young and single, it’s pretty hard to imagine a time when your life might be dramatically different. To wit, let’s look at one comment I received when I posted this same treatise on The Toad Stool:

• “In my view, Social Media gives you the opportunity to be scratch your socialization itch while letting you simultaneously ignore the dumbass sitting at the other end of your couch if you so choose.“

The point being that the poster here could not imagine that “the dumbass sitting at the other end of your couch” might someday be his spouse or child. Someone he’d have no wish to actually ignore.

Which brings us back to my original point: social networking doesn’t work for a large portion of the population because if we’re socializing online, we’re being anti-social to the people we live with. And last time I checked, a goodly number of Americans lived in family units where the main focus of their social life was with other family members. Not members of their Facebook network.

What’s sad is, did we need one year of Facebook to come to this conclusion?