The internet is a terrific invention. Branching out from Google in any direction is liable to drown you in news, facts or bosomy teenagers inside twenty minutes. It's also been arguably the greatest aid to international understanding the world has ever seen; back when Napoleon was jaunting across Europe, it was very easy to paint the French as a horrific torrent of barbarians, but that's made infinitely more difficult when in a few clicks you can be swapping cocktail recipes with a man from Marseilles. Anyway, it's in this climate of cultural understanding that I came to spend my evening talking to a Serb about war, an act which is roughly comparable to talking to water about being wet, and an act that wouldn't have been possible without the advent of the miracle that is the Internet. Unfortunately, while it has blessed us with boundless communication and endless knowledge, it has also inflicted upon us a terrible scourge of tossers by the thousands.
Few things are less explainable in this modern society than the existence of Twitter, the latest symptom of the sense of hilarious entitlement coursing through the veins of everyone under the age of twenty-five. With this great new technological step forward, we have afforded an astonishing amount of young people the delusion that we are all waiting, poised in front of our monitors, for the latest update on which way they've combed their hair. The internet, two decades in the making and quite possibly the single greatest invention in our modern age, has apparently reached it's zenith in a teenager's ability to tell the world that they're quite sad. Yes, yes you are.
Young people confuse me. Twitter leaves me baffled. MySpace boggles the mind. I have an account on something called Facebook, but I'm completely unable to master the sort of witchcraft used to make it actually do anything, so by the time I get around to calling someone for a drink, they've already been to the pub, taken pictures of it and uploaded a video of two of them arm-wrestling onto Youtube. I've become a technological leper - in the time I've been back working since the start of 2009, I've had at least half a dozen people complain to me about not going to the apparently stunning New Year party they had, and how I could have at least have had the decency to tell them I wasn't going. I would have done, if I knew there was an option. There apparently was, obviously, as otherwise I wouldn't have committed such a dreadful faux-pas; it's out there, somewhere, on the internet. I didn't click it and now all my friends hate me.
I think it's a sign of getting old. I'm trying to keep up, I honestly am, but after I went through the rigmarole of organizing my own New Years invitations on Facebook, it asked for my home address, which is something I don't feel comfortable giving out to what the website vaguely dubs 'my social network', particularly when I still have vivid memories of my MySpace 'extended network' including every single person who ever held an account. Was there ever anyone who MySpace didn't consider to be in your extended network?
It's all a popularity contest, really. Nobody can just have a good night out anymore, we have to put our lives up for review by the internet, just so we can boast that half of Siam have watched us being sick. The MySpace obsession of gathering as many so-called friends as possible to the exclusion of everything else was fine when it was confined solely to the internet, but it's starting to bleed over into real life. Whenever I go out for the evening I get cameras stuck in my face from someone purportedly running a website called 'Don't Stay In', or from people I vaguely know taking four thousand pictures of me leaning against a wall and uploading them instantaneously from their web-camera-i-super-phone. The giggling shouty teenagers who persist in the belief that everyone in a four-mile radius desperately needs to know how wacky their friends are might revel in the idea that they're being followed everywhere by some sort of low-rent paparazzi, but I for one don't enjoy spending my evening with a zoom lens lodged up each nostril.
Maybe I'm just old before my time or just a miserable bastard to the core, but I would like, just for a change, for someone under twenty-five to have some sort of sense, and realise that no, the world does not care that you just had a poo.
Go away.
Few things are less explainable in this modern society than the existence of Twitter, the latest symptom of the sense of hilarious entitlement coursing through the veins of everyone under the age of twenty-five. With this great new technological step forward, we have afforded an astonishing amount of young people the delusion that we are all waiting, poised in front of our monitors, for the latest update on which way they've combed their hair. The internet, two decades in the making and quite possibly the single greatest invention in our modern age, has apparently reached it's zenith in a teenager's ability to tell the world that they're quite sad. Yes, yes you are.
Young people confuse me. Twitter leaves me baffled. MySpace boggles the mind. I have an account on something called Facebook, but I'm completely unable to master the sort of witchcraft used to make it actually do anything, so by the time I get around to calling someone for a drink, they've already been to the pub, taken pictures of it and uploaded a video of two of them arm-wrestling onto Youtube. I've become a technological leper - in the time I've been back working since the start of 2009, I've had at least half a dozen people complain to me about not going to the apparently stunning New Year party they had, and how I could have at least have had the decency to tell them I wasn't going. I would have done, if I knew there was an option. There apparently was, obviously, as otherwise I wouldn't have committed such a dreadful faux-pas; it's out there, somewhere, on the internet. I didn't click it and now all my friends hate me.
I think it's a sign of getting old. I'm trying to keep up, I honestly am, but after I went through the rigmarole of organizing my own New Years invitations on Facebook, it asked for my home address, which is something I don't feel comfortable giving out to what the website vaguely dubs 'my social network', particularly when I still have vivid memories of my MySpace 'extended network' including every single person who ever held an account. Was there ever anyone who MySpace didn't consider to be in your extended network?
It's all a popularity contest, really. Nobody can just have a good night out anymore, we have to put our lives up for review by the internet, just so we can boast that half of Siam have watched us being sick. The MySpace obsession of gathering as many so-called friends as possible to the exclusion of everything else was fine when it was confined solely to the internet, but it's starting to bleed over into real life. Whenever I go out for the evening I get cameras stuck in my face from someone purportedly running a website called 'Don't Stay In', or from people I vaguely know taking four thousand pictures of me leaning against a wall and uploading them instantaneously from their web-camera-i-super-phone. The giggling shouty teenagers who persist in the belief that everyone in a four-mile radius desperately needs to know how wacky their friends are might revel in the idea that they're being followed everywhere by some sort of low-rent paparazzi, but I for one don't enjoy spending my evening with a zoom lens lodged up each nostril.
Maybe I'm just old before my time or just a miserable bastard to the core, but I would like, just for a change, for someone under twenty-five to have some sort of sense, and realise that no, the world does not care that you just had a poo.
Go away.
No comments:
Post a Comment