Social illusions of the Myspace world…
Wow… It doesn’t feel like it’s been almost four months since I last blogged… I apologize for my apparent lack of drive to actually blog, I’ll try to get something written in here and there from now on. In the mean time, here’s a little rant I’ve had on my mind for a couple weeks.
Myspace and Facebook are great tools for keeping in touch with friends, if that’s what you’re actually using them for. See, interestingly enough, I’ve noticed more and more that people are using them for their intended purpose (social networking) less and less, and are using them more an more to try and live in their own little fantasy worlds. This is a culmination of those observations.
1) The popularity contest – The more people I have as friends, the more popular I clearly must be, so you all must bow down and worship my awesomeness. – Really? you base your entire social status on how many people you don’t talk to at all but you claim as friends simply to get your friend count up? Seriously?
Here’s a hint, kiddies. You’ll never have more friends on your friends list than Tom does on Myspace, the man’s your default “friend” on Myspace. And do you seriously think Tom actually knows all 2 million “friends” he has? Heck no! If Tom wasn’t the founder and forcing his way into your friends list, chances are you could seriously care less about the guy, and he’d have a “normal” friend count like the rest of us. Simply because you have 200,000 friends on your Myspace page doens’t mean I think you’re cool. It makes me think you have too much free time.
2) The riddler – I’m going to send you 30,000 quizzes a day and think that you hate me if you don’t respond. – We all know that one person, you know, the one who responds to every quiz that’s sent out in a day, sends it out, and then gets mortally offended if you a) don’t bother to read their quiz because you read the last 10 variations of the same basic quiz and don’t really need to know about how much they like corn or b) don’t repost your relatively useless factoids about yourself because you don’t spend all day camping out on Facebook waiting for something to repost. And let’s face it, the most annoying ones are “If you don’t resend this to at least 10 people, you’ll never fall in love, your dog will die, your pickup truck will break down, and the rest of your life will be a twangy country song.”
If you want to send out quizzes, fine. Heck, I’ll respond to some of them once in a while, even! But for the love of crackers, I don’t have time to read every single one you send out in the course of a day! I have a job, just because you’re unemployed and bored and haven’t run out of money to pay the internet bill with, doesn’t mean we all have that kind of free time! Seriously!
3) The poser – Sure, I was a dork in high school, but look at how cool I am now! – We all know him, the one guy who tried to play it off like he was cool in high school, but he was a dork, tragically uncool, and we all knew it. And reminded him constantly. Somehow, despite our best efforts in high school to cut him down, make him realize he was a dork, and that he needed to stop acting like a tool, somehow he developed this hyperinflated ego since graduation and in his own grandiose fantasy world, he’s now trying to convince the rest of the world that he’s made it and he really is as cool as he thought he was in high school.
This is the guy who posts pictures of himself with his arms around random women (who, oddly enough, all seem slightly bewildered and are holding alcoholic beverages). Or the classic group shot of about ten women with him just sort of hanging out in the back (completely out of place, it’s like he set one of his poser friends up with a camera and “nonchalantly” walked into the shot just as soon as the girls friends got posed for their picture. You know EXACTLY who I’m talking about, don’t you?
Seriously, these people are some of the funnest, simply because they’ve not changed since high school. They’re still delusional enough to think that they’re cool, and we’re still sane enough to remember they still aren’t, they need to get women liquored up just to get a photograph with one. You’re not fooling anyone, so stop trying. It didn’t work in high school, it still won’t work now!
4) The emo-kid – No one likes me, everyone hates me, why don’t I kill myself? – Last, but certainly not least, is the person who has to find a stormcloud in every silver lining. Their job sucks, their life sucks, their friends suck, why are they even living, blah blah blah. This is the one who finds a reason to complain about how much life sucks to everyone in the world willing to read it. Most of us don’t bother reading their blog posts unless we’re abnormally happy and want to depress ourselves. Additionally, this person convinces themself that the rest of us actually care about their hangnail that’s ruined their mood, when in actuality we realize if there’s a new blog post from that person, it’s probably a dead skunk ruined their morning and they have to gripe about how it affected their entire day and are sick of the whining.
If there’s really that much wrong in the world, I think you need to throw out your laptop and go help out at a soup kitchen. You have a roof over your head, a job that pays your bills, and your life isn’t as bad as the rest of humanity, and we’re really not going to be convinced otherwise in spite of your whining. Tough it out, kid.
Okay, I’m done. This has been another fine episode of Andrew nonchalantly ranting…