I like Facebook, I really do. Alright, so it lets people bombard me with persistent requests that I hug them, bite them or rate them on some sort of crush-o-meter (sorry Dan, you just don't do it for me), and of course I could pick up the phone and actually call whoever it is I want to go for a swift pint with, but for the psuedo-antisocial among us who's refusal to organize parties is due to laziness rather than any deep-rooted dislike for people, it's a wonderful discovery. The sort of invention that means I'm only ever three clicks and a 'Select All' from a pint of beer. I love it.
The problem was that it just didn't really know what it was. There is a pale, nerdy and slightly podgy school of thought out there that suggests Facebook went downhill around the time that it opened its doors to everyone instead of just college students, and you needed to know your own college email and the college emails of all your friends before you could get an account and add them, the creators obviously not realising that everyone that knew all their friends by email address probably never went outside in the first place, and if he did he could just email all his friends inviting them to the pub without having to go through a slightly awkward and badly-coded middle-man.
The concept of a social networking site that didn't allow any sort of social networking outside your own pre-existing peer groups didn't really take off, for obvious reasons i.e. not even college students are that stupid. MySpace ate the proverbial lunch of Facebook for three or four years, at least as far as anyone can tell, largely because it allowed fourteen year old girls to wear big girls clothes, upload forty-eight million poorly-lit strangely-angled boob shots per day, overload the internet and give Chris Hansen a heart attack, while Facebook was only just starting to let you pretend to be a badly-drawn werewolf and annoy your friends. The irony of there probably now being an application that allows you to play a 'Jerk' who goes around 'annoying' in the same way the 'Werewolves' went around 'biting' is almost too delicious to avoid searching for, were it not for the fact there would be forty-four thousand people that thought the whole idea was hilarious and in no way even more tedious than the zombie werewolves via the inclusion of the dreaded meta-joke would be far too soul destroying for me to bear.
Yes, the age of the Facebook applications was upon us, and as soon as they pulled their finger out and released an API, there were suddenly thousands of them, and everyone loved every single one. I know, because everyone I know seemingly added every Facebook application on the internet, and every single one took it upon itself to invite me. The whole business has come full circle in that now MySpace has added an applications section in order to compete with Facebook, and is fighting a losing battle now that it's the latecomer rather than the former grand champ that has the most available applications for speeding up the process of leering at nubile young girls on the internet. A cursory search for 'rate' or 'dating' on Facebook's application directory reveals far too many results for me to bother sifting through, and serves only to prove that Facebook has, at last, found an identity, and one that has all but crushed all other social networking websites on the web; it's a boob-viewing machine. At least, that's what the guys know it as. The girls are largely under the impression that these applications can be used to find A Nice Man, which is frankly impossible as I am the nicest man on the internet and I'm a complete bastard.
But even though I share a sex with the grunting masses that have probably passed through the profile of every woman on the internet, touching themselves through their work trousers and secretly hoping they're the pretty one on the left, and even if I am an absolutely awful person with no redeeming features whatsoever, I can't help but feel slightly sorry for the hordes of women that really do think that these applications can be used for anything close to real dating, and not for the sort of grubby comment about your tits you're likely to get in your inbox as your only form of communication from the male side of the internet. I know all sorts of accusations could be bandied about pertaining to womens' unrealistic aspirations of romance and the belief that their very own Prince Charming is just a click of a mouse away, but surely they deserve better than constant sexual harrassment on the part of the average male dating site member, ergo a self-employed gas fitter who's view of female sexual behaviour is the fevered product of internet pornography and an overactive imagination.
The problem is, the internet seems to make people drunk. It drains away the inhibitions that stop us from acting like a soft-headed toddler with a hard-on in public and replaces it with the sort of complete personality failure that you only see in shark feeding frenzies and nightclubs at chucking-out time; slurring, neanderthal beings crashing around, pointing at women's chests, shouting loudly about being 'bangable' and generally being about as enjoyable and complimentary for the women in question as setting their tits on fire. If alcohol is the excuse then they're doing a national service as the minute they stop their constant heroic consumption we're all going to drown in a terrible Stella Artois flood engulfing Britain from stem to stern, but I sincerely doubt that it is, and attribute the entire thing to the sort of sheer bloody-minded obnoxiousness that can only flourish in the toxic environment of the internet.
My favourite of all these applications is still 'Hot, Cute or Okay', which I covered in a previous post referring to the rediculousness of not being able to rate someone 'ugly', and perhaps that's the reason these sort of people continue to be encouraged; if the worst someone can possibly say about you is that you're OK, or skip you, you can continue to shout 'OY OY' at them until they rate you at least 'Okay' just so you shut up and fuck off. My new favourite thing about the whole place, however is the fact all comments - not private messages, but that takes an extra click and these people have hormone-laced declarations of lust to hammer out, perhaps by slapping their semi-flaccid member off the keyboard - are out in the open. You are only ever one flick of the mouse away from the adolescent gibberings of the sort of men that don't have the brain power to type with one hand and fruitlessly masturbate with the other - has any woman, unafflicted by WKD and crap dance music, ever fallen for 'dam u look hot bbz'?
In any case, I'm not going to link you to it, you can find it yourself, but it's definitely worth it. You might even find me on there, and get to call me a name. Just for the comedy, though. As for actual dating, try a pub or something. Never, ever the internet.
Goodnight.
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