HOW DO YOU DO?

How do you do…

Fucking Facebook

The bane and sacrament of so many, facebook, the joyous routine of the masses, facebook, 500 million converted, facebook, a million photos a second, facebook, the blue and the white, the blue and the white, facebook.

Sly omnipotence fathered this mass miss communication device. Wary at first, you created a profile conscious of the past. But this is easier; this is a Dyson when you were using your friend’s cellotape.

Cellotape Myspace

Oh Myspace, we scarcely remember you, it’s only music right, music you have, and nobody seriously checks their profiles anymore, do they?

Going through is like a graveyard to the past, where people designed their pages, at times using actual programming language. Creating self-absorbed multi-coloured marvels, glitter effects abound, whirling, bouncing and flash flash flashing at your eyeballs. It had personality, too much personality, videos intersected by reams of long tall paragraphs, 100s and 1000s of films and music lists, interests and hobbies, interests and hobbies? They’re your friends; you should know this. Then, a more innocent time, Myspace was the future now the future is in the past.

So we left our friends, saying we’ll be back, this facebook thing won’t last, I might as well try it though, but it looks so rubbish and sterile and restricted, why would I stay here?

But we did…

…well most of us did, some just joined up thinking, “Blimey this new emails come along way Pat.”

Better, faster, stronger, longer?

I can’t criticise it because I use it, I like it, I think I like it, it’d be like criticising my own judgement, I can’t do that. Anyway facebook is so everywhere and absolute it’s like the new extreme ping pong, imbibing itself into our consciousness like a collective ego try to manage it’s whims. Desiring friends, comments and likes, scavenging promotion, prostituting a stylistic something?

What’s on your mind?

Why? Fuck, off! I know what you’re for, basically it’s for if you have something to say and nobody cares, something you want to tell the whole of your facebook friends because you think they should all know this hilarious joke about anal sex with a starfish or this wondrously witty statement about the current death toll in Afghanistan being the same as the amount of heroin addicts living in the U.K. using the epitaph “their both fuct.” Or just plain moods & foods; frustrated = meatballs, happy + potato faces, philosophical… Alphabeti spaghetti.

Prying like some psychotherapist or social worker’s staple statement, what’s on your mind? “The reoccurring feeling I’m wasting something, doing nothing.”

Every so often you get angry public confessionals over spited fuck fails leaving neglected children, jilted one-nights, and carelessly obscene rant-fests. Oh wait, someone has gone from single to relationship, meh, oh someone’s gone from relationship to single, woohoo! Break up has a salivating relish to the grit sandwich seeing that little comic heart ripped apart. Come on, I missed out on public execution, it’s entertainment.

Campaign!

I want to get 500,000,000 people to ignore my stupid issue I have with something so banal or pointless nobody has done anything to change it so far that it takes me pestering, so people join and I get interviewed by Melinda Messenger which will be the high point in my life yet the lowest and slowest point for the already unfortunate viewing public.

I’m being mean; getting Rage Against The Machine to Christmas No 1 was pretty amazing. Saving 6 Music was an achievement for the continued employment of John Peel’a’likes. The “we demand a rematch” campaign for England seems to have petered out at a hearty 1001 some of which joined after Spain’s victory celebration which marks the END of the World Cup. Though the campaign for scroll wheels on electronic readers is seemingly boundless at 31.

You know who to thank when your £400 e reader comes and you realise the new 3D scroll wheel pokes out your bag making it impossible to carry, so you have to resort in using that small, light, unaffordable, energy independent, drop proof, scratch proof, book.

Friends

Denying and accepting friends is a power trip; if you consider rollerblading cowabunga cool and use the phase cowabunga. Basically a warning before uploading yourself onto this is. Do you want to read information from people you used to avoid in Secondary School in the same teenage tongue they used then but with added lols, wtfs and babies, then come on in. Thing is, if you don’t accept the scalls they’ll be offended and probably try again and if you turn them down again, they may happyslap you. The irony will be lost.

What about those others, the ‘non-cunts.’ The ones you meet and think, “yeah, I think they deserves my surname.” They’re not your friends yet, they’re just people you’re curious about in a voyeuristic sense but will probably never meet again. From the moment you swapped your request & accept the time makes the very situation of your meeting automatically awkward and eventually almost impossible due to unfathomable information you have acquired through profile spying while waiting to be invited out by them. Conversely meaning you could quite probably friend fuck their minds the moment you meet.

Your friends are people you meet in person or talk / interact with, in brief, the real. Just because your facebook friends ‘like’ a thing you said, wish you a reminder happy birthday, say they’ve answered a randomised question about you or gave you some jpg champagne bottle, doesn’t mean a cabbage patch in Farmville.

New Photos

Hours wasted clicking through 1200 photos of a snap-happy friend’s holiday photos; house, car, me and her, old house, me and her and old house, horse, food, close up of food, beach, beach, beach, sea, local, me and her, her cleavage, me, beach, me and beach, sea, sea, sea, boat and sea, sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset (repeat). Then there’s Crete 2, and Crete 3, Crete 4. You’re thinking is there a single thing in Crete they haven’t photographed, then there’s Crete 5.

It’s like you’ve suddenly become the person you hate, the person who actually wants to look, earwigs other peoples conversations, spies, lies and changes their image from their face, to their face, to their face, back to their face.

Out of control: Party

Watch it drinks’a’lot, when you have your crazy facebook party, it can quickly turn into asphyxiated nightmares. But that’s o.k. you can hide yourself amongst the 2,000 strangers tearing bricks from mortar like dumb drunk bored beasts. Cos that’s why I go to parties, wanton destruction, lobbing stuff at police while being squeezed into a crowds of screeching and screaming 14 year olds collectively drunk off a can of their Dad’s Magners. No really it’s great, you get a £20,000 bill and your face in the paper with the words “stupid kid” or “misguided dickface” underneath, you’re a legend, now go see what your own piss tastes like.

The world and his hamster

Even on a bad, good or indifferent day, it’s the same innocuous space. Everyone’s on, your mums on, the guy at the shops on, the guy at the shops nine year old son’s on, the guy at the shops son’s dog’s on. You share this new millennium super virtual social network with things that enjoy licking their genitals, and dogs. And people still wonder why intelligent life hasn’t answered our calls.

WARNING - Irritants

The things I hated on Myspace were shit bands that ceaselessly wanted to be my friend then sent me ten anyone messages a week about their gig in an attic which, by their last gig in a cupboard should be shit shattering, by that I mean, fucking awful. On facebook nothing’s changed, dicks request you and then event you, update their night, nightly. Posting pestering prats in pretentious posings indifferent from lasts weeks posing pricks. Your weekly slew of motivational messaging to “wreck it” and “join us” because, you can’t miss it. Then you miss it.

My Book?

Come on, facebook is another way to show us up as us. Your honest display of gaudy loutish slut-bag, quirky irksome try-hard, cooler than dress-the-autopsy nights at Not a Night, hipster. Oh and the “can’t you see I’m so damn successful.” Big Deals. Then there’s the rest of them, us, a mix potch max hotch of people with their own opinions, their own reasons, their open gates or private walls. All not quite sure the reason why they’re on this virtual floating database full of, to all intense in purposes, useless chatter and updates on said chatter. Too much to really care, there’s no going back, we’ve gone too far, the chats are too numerous and facile to decipher the messages too vague and absentminded to be worth viewing. We’re intertwined in a colossal soap opera on good days more depraved than ‘naked burning aids babies rim the tweenies’ and on bad days less exciting than ‘Songs of Praise : Musical Medly Hour’ you’ve just watched, repeated, for the entire duration of your life.

We need it, but without it, it won’t be missed but the fear is, will we?