This first piece was for the subject 'Social Networking'.
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Human Interaction Devoid of Real Context
I’m going to narrow this topic down to Facebook, because myspace is now a music website and I am no good at twitter.
Social networking is all things to all people; this is my broad, vague theory. Some people believe it is for noting their every movement, some believe it is for posting sexy pictures of themselves, some believe it is for plugging their gigs/blogs/videos/podcasts/business/products/etceteras, some believe it is for eulogising the dead, some believe it is for farming, some believe it is evil. They are all correct.
Social networking is the spectrum of human interaction rendered in digital form. It is human interaction devoid of real context, which enables people to interact near-autistically, freed from the constraint of manner and socially recognised appropriate behaviour. Most people are au fait with this for the most part, a quick glance at my most recent news feed shows a plug for a cancer charity, a video of a BBC Jimi Hendrix session, someone thanking their friends for birthday messages, an uploaded picture of a psychotic-looking iguana named Penny, and someone who’s posted her entire night’s plans for all to see, enabling them to conveniently set an ambush for her. All fairly innocuous, though when you log on wanting attention, it is dispiriting to simply find a stream of people peacocking in much the same way you did the last time you were on there, leaving forced witticisms and chirpy open-ended eagerness in the hopes that people will come on board the comment train.
The main problem, as I see it, with social networking is the same problem to be had by instant messaging. This form of communication is far removed from what I will refer to as full interaction; the face to face, all-nuance and gurning meat, the classic old-school style of actually talking to someone. It is widely accepted that a large proportion of our interaction is interpreted through body language, to say nothing of the inflection and tone when speaking, all of which is lost through internet/purely text based communication. It is possible to write in a very colourful, engaging, descriptive way, it is not a foregone conclusion that shades of subtlety will be lost when communicating textually. But so few of us are writers, so few of us have the verbosity, the written skills that can be summoned off-the-cuff to flavour a running text-based conversation in a way which doesn’t fall short of what could be managed face to face. Obviously, I am a writer, and I do have the peerless ability to pour forth beautiful text conversation, but that just succeeds in accentuating my frustration with the paucity of everyone else’s capabilities. I know it’s not their fault they aren’t as brilliant as myself, but some amount of nuisance creeps in nevertheless.
Ironic arrogant hyperbole aside, the amount of confusion, misunderstanding and misinference that occurs due to the ambiguity of how text communication can be interpreted is a right royal pain in the arsehole and no fucking mistake. When arguments occur in the social networking arena, you are even denied the cathartic shouting match that would give the pathetic disagreement a degree of drama in the real world. This was fine back in the day when computer monitors were great big hefty devices, and you could launch a solid, rewarding headbutt on one, but now in the era of the flatscreen and the laptop such outbursts are far too financially taxing.
At the time of writing I have 324 friends on Facebook. These range from people I knew from school, comedians I met on the stand-up circuit, colleagues and people met briefly on random nights out. I perhaps communicate with 7 of them with any regularity, and only 3 of them with any depth. These are the same 3 people I will often see in person. And in fact, the same 3 people whose words appear on this blog. I would suggest this says more about my social interactions rather than the medium of social networking per se, but I think it certainly amplifies my habits, or perhaps the right phrase would be that it concentrates them.
Very few who use Facebook with any regularity will have fewer than, at the very least, 100 friends, and perhaps this is an outcome of a generation who grew up aspiring to be Pokemon masters, intent on catching them all. Facebook isn’t used to chat to your friends, it is used to keep track of them, like a nosy bastard peering over the garden fence. As they say, keep your friends close, and your enemies on Facebook.
It is ridiculous to what extent you can actually keep track of people using social networking. There are acquaintances I haven't seen since school whose day to day lives I am familiar with because of it, which, again, can be a good or a bad thing. In most cases it would be considered inappropriate and downright intrusive to have such a clear view into people's lives. So why isn't it online? Because they let us see it. They put it up for us to see. So have I. You probably have as well. This is the same reason we don’t feel weird scrolling through the 1000+ photos of those people we knew in school but haven't seen for years: it's because they put the pictures up there themselves, and allowed us access to them, wittingly or not.
I have genuinely mixed feelings about social networking. In writing this piece I toyed with the idea of closing my accounts a couple of times. Logging in and goggling down the newsfeed has become an unrewarding digital tic of mine. I'm not really reading the messages, I don't really know the people on there, and for the most part I won't in any way interact with what they post. And if I did I'd end up fussing over whether my comment was appropriate or not, whether they would understand where I was coming from.
The problem with social networking is that it isn't inherently good or bad. Nothing really is. It is an ever-changing chameleon beast; it can be a torrent of jokes, banal updates, bullying, publicly inappropriate photos, links, plugs, self-promotion, publicly inappropriate soppy love messages, publicly inappropriate arguments, empty token 'happy birthdays', arbitrary lying lols or infinitely unfolding comment pile-ups which result in an infinitely filled e-mail inbox notifications.
Social networking is too big a beast to fully get hold of, it wriggles and jiggles and shiggles all over the shop, depending which of the chimpanzees happens to be at the typewriter at that moment. Once you're connected, it's much harder to disconnect. Much like life, I often find social networking a largely unrewarding habit in which patience is occasionally rewarded with something pleasing, amusing or of interest, but those instances require a lot of sifting through valueless brown water.
I think I must just hate people. Or dislike them, at the very least. And with social networking, rather than in actual interaction on the physical plane, I can be playing a game and watching a show instead of listening to people. But even then it can drag you back in. In person, randomly chosen acquaintance A has no knowledge of Jon Irenicus, more fool them, but on Facebook there are a million Irenicus groups to choose from; "Like if you remember this banished elven cunt" (picture of Jon Irenicus), "Jon Irenicus is a mad cunt" or the spot on "Jon Irenicus is NOT a top fucking guy".
Of course none of those groups exist, but the point I was making still stands. My life is empty, and while social networking is not singularly to blame, it isn't fucking helping. I'm going for a sleep and complete life re-evaluation.
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To see the pieces of the other ACREs click on this bit here.
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