Sorry for rudely taking a three week break from writing blogs, (I'm sure no-one missed me) but I am back and intend to crack on with writing a few blogs, and I shall start with this blog, about Socialising on this modern, technological advancement, invented by Mankind, yet not very well known, and it's called 'The Internet'. The Internet, which is also known as the World Wide Web, can offer the user many things, such as watching Monkeys masturbate on YouTube, illegally share music, buy Viagra discreetly, look at the roof of their house on Google Maps, edit history on Wikipedia, watch porn, express their opinion which no-one cares about on blogs such as this and socialise.Social Networking sites now mean that we can keep in contact with all our friends and family, when at home on the laptop or on a train, playing with ones iPhone, which from a certain perspective, is great. However, teenagers like myself, have become dependent on this and some now don't feel the need to meet friends, as people used to do a generation ago, because sitting at home, watching telly and keeping up-to-date with the latest gossip with friends is somewhat more attractive to some than walking down a busy high street while it's raining and frantically trying to find something to do.
There are different areas of social networking. You have Twitter, which this year has grown a lot in popularity with more and more celebrities using it, and as well as allowing a user to keep up to date with what friends are doing and thinking, it also allows people to see what their favourite celebrities are up to. Windows Live Messenger (more often called MSN) focuses on the basic skill used by a majority to communicate, which is having a conversation with one or more people. Websites like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo are more general social networking sites, in which you can talk to friends, share images and videos, play games, and many other things, and these are probably the most popular forms of social networking the Internet has to offer.
You could probably call me a social networking addict, however, like most things I like, I find that lots of little things annoy me. Mainly on Facebook and MSN. You see, I no longer use Bebo and MySpace. You could call it an addiction I have overcome. Twitter, I am addicted to, but doesn't really annoy me to great lengths, like Facebook and MSN - or in other words, the things I use the most.
The first thing is Friendship. I have 130 friends on my Facebook and in comparison to a lot of peoples profiles, I look very unpopular, but a lot of people on my friends list, I hardly know and wouldn't really call them a friend in the real world, more an acquaintance I once went to school with, or someone I met through a friends friend once or twice. Some of these people, I have never spoken to in the real world. Another thing is that once they've added you as a friend, and you've accepted it, you both ignore each other. Don't talk to each other, if anything, it's just so they can nose into your profile and look at embarrassing images of me wearing a face mask... For example.
Something else that doesn't annoy me, more than it depresses me, is that people will always put kisses at an end of a message (xxxx) and yet, in the real world, I'd be lucky for them to look at me. Hardly anyone kisses me on the cheek, unless they're drunk, so why pretend? If people are going to put a kisses on a message to me, I expect them to actually kiss me in the real world. It's the little things in life, so they say anyway.Politicians and the police are wondering why there is some much violence in teenagers these days, but I think I have discovered the reason for this: Virtual Violence. I don't mean people playing violent games on their Playstation 3's and whatnot; it's all this nudging and poking you can do. Granted, probably not the most violent of things, but it can escalate out of control. It won't be long before you can 'Slap My Face' and a box pops up saying "Do you want video this and post on YouTube" and an animation with your friend's head on it is slapped, then punched and kicked, all in the name of fun and socialising. Possibly a bit extreme actually, but stranger things have happened.
Then you have all these application on Facebook, which can get irritating after a while. You have YoVille and FarmVille (both things I'm getting slightly addicted to for reasons I don't understand), in which you can have a little virtual life. The former allows you to work, earn money just so you can buy food and decorate your apartment. The latter is a bit more obvious, where your virtual life can grow and harvest Corn, Strawberry's, Plums and many other things, as well as milking cows and collecting eggs. The only bit of socialising you can do on these particular applications is looking at friend’s apartments and farms.
Another application is Friends Facts, in which people answer questions about their friends, and in return, can find out what their friends think about them. An example is "Do You Think John Has Ever Had A Crush On You?" Very simple. Mind you, if you put all my answers together they make no sense. According to one friend, I am a virgin, yet another friend believes I have had a threesome. Some answers are also very soul crushing. "Is Stuart Attractive? - No", "Do You Think Stuart Is Charismatic? - No" and many more along those lines.
Then you have the online quizzes which come with these websites. "Find Out When You Will Meet The Love of Your Life" and "What Michael Jackson Song Are You?" (I'm Man In The Mirror apparently) which are all just a waste of everyone's time - including mine. I can't see any point in them. I don't understand why that's considered part of socialising myself, it all just gets on my tits a little bit.
THEN, you have people becoming fans of every single thing that they can think of. People become fans of 'Kicking squirrels in the face', 'God', 'Big Brother' and during her media hype earlier in the year, 'Jade Goody'. You should have known she'd be mentioned sooner or later. Anyway, people becoming fans of stupid things like that, gives a good indication as to what kind of person they are, whether it's cruel, pissed, idiotic, a slut, or maybe even nice. Some people do become fans laughter and flowers, but why people feel the need to become fans of everything and anything, I have no idea.
Also, you have the option to 'Like' something which another friend has said or done. This is something which people use to the extreme, liking anything and everything. I could change my status to 'Stuart Collyer is contemplating suicide' and in the box underneath it'd have '2 People Like This' and someone would have commented saying 'Lol'. I must come across as a moody old bloke (despite being a happy 17 year old) because I refuse to like or comment on anything unless I really do like it, but mostly, things on Facebook make me apathetic. I would like them to have a dislike option though, not because I'd go around disliking everything on Facebook, just purely in the interest of fairness.
Facebook and Twitter has however, taken away our privacy and freedom of speech (in a certain respect) because secrets can't kept, as someone will have an image of you being drunk, dancing on the coffee table, despite you telling Mummy you wouldn't drink or phoning in sick at work, and being tagging in a photo of you on the beach, smiling and doing a thumbs up to the camera, dated the day you apparently had diarrhoea.
Twitter and Facebook, have allowed the everyday person, to document their day and turn it into a ‘Big Brother’ of their life. People change their statuses in order to tell everyone else what they are doing. It can be anything from 'I'm bored at home' to 'I'm going into town'. Maybe they should change the format of Big Brother next year, where they lock everyone in the house for 3 months as usual, but instead of having camera, they set up Facebook and Twitter accounts and then they update their status every so-often and every night on Channel 4, instead of showing the best clips from the day, the Geordie bloke (called Marcus) reads out the best profile updates of the day. It combines two pointless inventions of Mankind, into one, easier to handle annoyance.
Anyway, a majority of my blog readers, actually read this on my Facebook profile, because (to get technical for just a minute) I set up an RSS feed which automatically posts my blog onto Facebook every time I add a new one. That means that probably someone will ‘like’ this blog and thus continuing the circle of liking everything and anything on Facebook. For those of you reading on Facebook though, this is the address for my blog, in case you wanted to know what it looks like. www.im-called-stuart.blogspot.com
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
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