On the importance of maintaining social networks

Oh it's working now. Great. That's just great. I can't wait to post this blog to Facebook. That's what life is all about. This is life.

Confirm, confirm, confirm... I don't know who the fuck these people are - these friends. It's all a popularity thing; a numbers game. It's a mindless, stupid fucking game. A manipulated corporate game of herding. A game many of us are forced to play in order to achieve social acceptance. The upside is we get to notify each other of things that we don't have any intention of attending. We usually say "Maybe" to these.

Do I like Phil? Yeah, actually I do - but do I want to admit it in public? Admit it in the form of a sheep being whistled and barked into a pen? If they had an option of Maybe, or "I don't dislike Phil" I would choose that one instead.

Facebook was out this morning so the social networking addicts had to make do with the twitstream of global consciousness. Twitter is a system of ticker-tape telegram messages to one another - and far less concocted and manipulated by artificial prompts than Facebook. Twitter is like texting and Facebook is like blogging. The same people pop up on all the networks though. Take the grey cardy vacuum of Russell Brown as an example. Here is New Zealand's most successfully syndicated technology and media guru earlier this morning using the power of the internet and it's astounding technology to tell us...
...what he had for breakfast:
And here is one of Russell's mates a little later reposting semi-literate messages on the same social networking site about what the social networking site is doing when the other social networking site isn't working:
It's so much social shit-dribble - it can barely be described as content.

And speaking of barely describable shit-dribble it's coming up to 11am and Radio NZ is playing another tedious, soporific "reading" of another thoroughly, utterly boring piece of NZ writing. It is not worth listening to. It wasn't worth writing, it wasn't worth recording, it wasn't worth broadcasting. Every single sub-mediocre yawn on National Radio from 10:45 to 11:00 every weekday morning is of a similar dire quality. And your taxes are paying for it. Subsidised cultural suicide.

I'll leave you this morning, you wretched New Zealanders, with this hypothesis on actual suicide that is also applicable to social networking and culture:

Looking beyond the acute circumstances that trigger a suicide, people don't kill themselves because of a failing or deficiency in their own personality or character - they kill themselves because of the failings and deficiencies of others.

In particular they suicide upon the realisation that these failings and deficiencies are generally rewarded (or at least tolerated by society at large) and there is absolutely nothing they can do about changing these other people and almost nothing they can do about changing the way in which these other people are able to affect them. They can only survive past that point of realisation by either aspiring to become a failed and deficient person themselves (and thus achieve a measure of "normality" in the social order - with the wealth and security it provides - as a trade-off for personal integrity) or they have to construct a strategy of tolerance and avoidance towards the everyday routine failings and deficiencies of other people (in which case they get to keep their own personal standards, but sacrifice any influence or avenues of achievement they may have had if they were to embrace the failings and deficiencies of others).

The point of realisation - if it occurs at all - usually happens in a series of events in the teenage years when indoctrination and punishment from institutions, peers and family reach a crisis and the youth must choose between rebellion and conformity. Almost all will choose conformity, a very few will choose to continue to rebel (and will necessarily still have to adopt some form of tolerance strategy with a level of minimal co-operation to survive) and a smaller amount will suicide because the choice is fundamentally repellant and any society built on those terms isn't a place worth living in. Some people will revisit the realisation point much later in life following an acute event or circumstances. In these cases, with their lifetime of first-hand experience of "how the real world works" and a sober assessment of their future prospects in that scheme, they usually kill themselves without hesitation or fuss.

There is no rebellion. We can all keep perfectly calm.