Ed₃

Let me admit this openly so I can move on with my life. I have a Facebook account.
Some of you love social networking, some of you hate it. Personally I find it useful for keeping in touch with several friends at once via the group function, it beats being the mediator for a deluge of text messages.

Those of you who hate it usually cite one rather pronounced reason: Shameless self promotion. It’s present in Facebook in abundance, everyone says they’re on the site to keep in touch with old school buddies but were they to be openly and brutally honest (and how often is that going to happen?) what they would be saying is “I use it to scream from my little online rooftop about how fantastic and amazing me and my life are”.

Take a look through your friends list and see for yourself the self praise among the status updates of your friends. It often comes thinly veiled as a complaint or some kind of hardship.

I miss my friends and the awesome time I had in my really expensive Caribbean holiday ((((( Woe is me, look at how awesome I am, my life sucks solely because it is so great.

Since when did everyone become so vain as to believe the rest of the world gives a damn that they’re pretending to be upset about their high powered yet demanding job, or the untimely end of their awesome holiday? I personally coudln’t possibly care less that Thomas is hung over because his *many* friends demand more drinking time in his fabulous company than his poor body can cope with.

I know what the inevitable response here is going to be, choose the right Facebook friends and you never need to see this crap. I see the merit in such a statement, but this kind of behaviour is so pervasive in the worldwide Facebook circle jerk that Im not sure, short of an empty friends list that you could ever truly be shot of it.

The whole issue seems indicative of a larger epidemic. The internet has empowered everyone to make their thoughts known to the masses. The only problem there is that not everyone has something worthwhile or useful to say.

Thanks to the freedom of speech imparted by the internet, any idiot who can mash a keyboard is entitled to the misguided belief that their opinions hold more weight than your average Joe, or that they are somehow a writer. Take a walk into a few Starbucks outlets where you live and tell me if you haven’t spotted at least one pseudo intellectual buffoon.

You know the type, in his alternative clothing and blue tinted glasses, typing away about something nobody cares about, in public, on his needlessly expensive Macbook Pro. There’s another pseudo intellectual staple, the overpriced laptop which he is struggling to keep up the payments on, bad writing doesn’t pay the bills and Reese is too creative for a real job. Of course you and I are fooled, Reese makes a fortune off his musings and that’s why he can afford such a flash piece of gadgetry.

I dont mean to make a sweeping declaration regarding all Mac owners or indeed Facebook users. These guys are the exception to the rule, but as always the bad apple (if you’ll excuse the pun) stands out much more pronounced than all the good ones with whom he shares a barrel.

The internet has given rise to a new form of snobbery, the creative “artiste”, the roaming wordsmith who is e-savvy and can throw around buzzwords he cannot understand with the ease of a professional. Subject to a little scrutiny however, this watery facade is revealed for the joke that it is – just another form of vacuous posturing.