Shut your facebook
The Landlady
One of my pet hates is people – commonly of the older generation – who bang on about how Facebook and Myspace have destroyed society’s ability to communicate. I was at a party recently when a very nice, well-educated chap, of about my age, was saying just that, claiming that social values were rapidly disintegrating because most teenagers spend their lives sitting in front of one screen or another. In my opinion, this kind of talk is exactly like that of older people who dismiss modern music as ‘rubbish’ and think that everything began and ended with Bob Dylan. Now, although I’d love to, I’ve never been on Myspace or Facebook in my life as I have many other things that I ought to be doing and, once I’ve done those, I have many more things that I would like to do and none of them involve sitting at a computer. Even though I’m unlikely to do it myself, I do think that such activities have given an interest to people who would otherwise do nothing.
Believe me, I know what I’m talking about as, growing up in the 1970s and having little desire to do anything but sprawl on the floor watching Little House on the Prairie, and later, smoking while watching myself in the mirror, I am one of those very people who would have benefited massively from the intervention of Facebook. All of those horrid Sunday afternoons, with old people snoring and me waiting for the Top 20 to come on could have been transformed.
“I am one of those very people who would have benefited massively from the intervention of Facebook”
I remember during the school holidays back in the early ‘70s, when the TV only came on at lunchtime, myself and my little pal Richard Wheeldon would sit for hours on end in front of the Test Card waiting for Watch With Mother to come on. OK, so sometimes we would dance a bit to the music which accompanied The Test Card – which was not Bob Dylan – but generally our young lives were swathed in total inertia. Lord only knows who was supposed to be looking after us while all this Test Card watching was going on, but certainly no one ever told us to switch it off. Even as I got older, I had no desire to take up needlepoint, go on long walks, form a knitting circle, learn close-magic, or write my first novel, and spent most of my time experimenting with make-up, listening to very loud music and, erm, smoking. In spite of all this isolation and lack of pastimes, I think I have become a fairly sociable adult who can hold a decent conversation, which is quite an achievement.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Facebook and the like have filled a huge, gaping void for those people who haven’t got anything better to do and would otherwise be smoking while watching themselves in the mirror, or worse. The Big Daughter – who has never taken up smoking as a pastime – is a big subscriber to Facebook, whereas The Big Son has now given up smoking, and although he is much less inert than he used to be, would sooner lie on his side doing nothing. Meanwhile, The Small Daughter spent last Sunday afternoon ‘making clothes’ with real scissors and needles at her friend Eleanor’s house and would much rather be doing that than sitting in front of any type of screen. This all goes to show that people have done and always will do what they want and no amount of Facebook will ever make an iota of difference…
April 8th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Online social networking seemed so promising and liberating at first to my naive imagination. My 75 year old mom thought it was the devil. I was wrong. She was right. She is more politically experienced and astute than myself. The not-so-subtle issue is ownership, and with it, the totalitarian control it affords. Whatever good social networking websites do for you on the short run is more than undermined by private ownership. Theirs, NOT YOURS.
The Soviet Union seemed a wonderfully promising response to fascism at first. The pigs on animal farm had such a seductive plan. Cocaine can work wonders. It’s so cheap and easy to build your house out of straw that anyone can do it! Invading a less powerful nation seems like a good idea until we realize that we never had an exit strategy. My mother wasn’t born yesterday; she can smell a stinky deal from a mile off.
So far the only way to build a brick house is to build your own website at your own domain name and keep your own mailing list. I’ll revisit the concept of social networking online when there’s a fully distributed open standard for it that nobody owns – like email. Fortunately there are some very clever people working on one…. now that would be truly cool.