I value my friends enormously, and am proud of my wide circle of friends from all walks of life – friends I have amassed along life’s rich, colourful, yet obstacled path.
So why the hell would I need ‘virtual friends’?
On a daily basis I receive online invitations to become somebody’s friend – by and large, people I don’t know. “Will you be my friend please?” are words I haven’t heard since break time in the “Grassy” at the Model School. One of the most irritating things in the ‘real world’ is when one is poked in order to get attention. However I can choose not to be ‘virtually poked’.
Facebook boasts in excess of 60 million users. And I’m not one of them. In truth I don’t ‘Facebook’, bebo, or twitter, despite mounting peer pressure to do so. Somehow I don’t feel the need for a computer to ‘suggest’ who should be my friend. Nor do I want the world to snoop in on who I have decided to rank as my ‘Top Friends’. ‘Virtual farming’ likewise doesn’t do it for me. ‘Facebook’ profiles appear almost identical, and it seems tricky to leave Facebook once you join. All in all – ‘Big Brother’ online.
I fully recognise that many of these ‘social networking sites’ are an excellent means of keeping in touch with family, friends and ex-classmates, as well as offering other features such as photo-sharing. Sites such as Linked-In facilitate professional networking. Fansites bring together people with common interests. In spite of that, social networking seems to have gone too far, utterly taking over lives, and becoming the new 21st Century addiction. Furthermore, it condones slang, misspellings, bad grammar, that dreadful text-talk, those frightful ‘smileys’, ‘LOLs’ andall that dross.
The art of letter-writing and card-sending is undergoing a drawn-out demise, having been replaced by email and other online and mobile methods of communication. With an ever-emerging amount of social networking sites, it appears that we are now further laying ourselves open to identity theft, fraud and an irredeemable loss of privacy.
It sometimes seems that every technological advancement, while unquestionably meritorious, is paradoxically causing society to drift further apart.
I was excited to acquire my first mobile phone, but have resisted upgrading to a Blackberry, or more recently an I-Phone. My LPs became cassettes, and later CDs. But I seldom download music from I-Tunes, as I still prefer to buy the CD. My DVDs replaced my videos shortly after my Discman supplanted my Walkman, but do I really need to upgrade to Blu-Ray now? I already have hundreds of TV channels, of which I have watched a handful, and have thus far resisted Movie Channels, as I always take great pleasure in the whole cinema experience (including, admittedly, a minor addiction to Pick ‘n Mix).
Am I odd?
I appreciate the apparent advantages of online books, and the ability to browse your laptop library anytime anywhere, but surely E-books aren’t going to take off. As Hughes &Hughes permanently closes its doors, perhaps the pleasure of spending an hour in a bookshop, choosing a new paperback is going to become a thing of the past, and with it, the physical aspect of holding a book, or falling asleep reading. What then of the buzz and excitement when a ‘Harry Potter’ book is released – will that vanish if books are to become readily available online?
And then there is the newest iteration of inane geeky micro-blogging – Twitter. Doesone have to be a ‘twit’ to ‘twitter’? Or is it tweet? Perhaps ‘tweeters’ are simply narcissistic people with too much time on their hands. I don’t need to know what type of crumpet Jonathan Ross had, or what kind of moisturizer Jordan rubs on her botox – no matter how famous or irritating they are.
In a nutshell, we are becoming permanently tethered to the Internet. I am not suggesting for a moment that, like Greta Garbo, I “want to be alone”, but why not spend more ‘real time’ with our friends and family? Adopt a pet, exercise. Everything in moderation. It seems like the negative components of the Internet are beginning to outweigh the positive. What in reality are the advantages of spending hours in front of a computer screen – ‘blogging’? And for those of you who think I’m some sort of 20th Century Scrooge, trapped in a technological time-warp – BLOG OFF!?
