These are your friends
I've recently registered on Facebook. I've accumulated fourteen friends; which I thought was quite good until I found out that my 23 year old assistant has 188 because apparently everyone at Uni was on it.
As part of the original Internet generation, my comprehension of it was basically as a big unwieldy largely inaccurate book. Social networking was limited to a bit of email and the odd message board. I'm probably missing the whole point of Web 2.0, but apart from accumulating friends, I just seem to spend most of my time finding out that my friends are making friends with people I've never heard of and that this person has dropped a sheep on the other person's head. It's like a giant Vic and Bob convention.
I also recently had a tootle around Second Life. I went to a club and stood like a dork in the middle of dancefloor trying to work out how to activate my 'dancing' mode. At one point a naked man with glow stick bangles on skimmed across my screen, so I went and stood in a corner so I could try and work out the basic controls. One of the quick keys is to take all your clothes off, which explains much of Second Life's purpose, I suppose. Whilst standing in the corner, I managed to 'overhear' a conversation which went something along the lines of:
"U have gr8 boobs"
"Thnx lol"
They didn't seem at all embarrassed 'talking' like this in front of a man walking in circles and occasionally flying into walls (me, trying to work out the controls still) but I was embarrassed listening to it. I logged off and am probably still standing lifelessly listening to endless trance music whilst the, *shudder*, cyber-flirting goes on around me.
My fundamental issue with all this is that its unnatural. I do not make complete strangers ('randoms' according to my 23 year old assistant) my friends just because they ask in real life and can't get my head around doing it on the Internet. Nor can I quite get into the idea of telling someone they have "gr8 boobs" when that person is probably a fat trucker from Albuquerque called Derek. Above all, Second Life, as one person put it, is men pretending to be women having sex with women pretending to be unicorns.
Quite frankly, if I wanted to have sex with a unicorn, I'd just go out and do it.
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