Put away the remote, I’m back!
Working at a new and significantly busier job has precluded me from entering any new blog entries of late.
Additionally with the advent of this bizarre push for web ownership by the computer illiterate masses in the form of Facebook, Bebo, My Space and the many other incarnations of what are effectively are personal home pages for dummies, I’ve not really had time to concentrate on my blog at all.
It’s slightly galling for me that it’s now so easy to make your own web space, admittedly restricted by whatever system you use but nonetheless, there used to be a day where putting together a personal web page was a skill, and developing one that looked good and had good content was an art form.
With the advent of all these user friendly tools, any man and his dog can put together a space and decorate it with any number of ridiculous applications and skinning engines, often with no thought to design or style.
Frankly I’m appalled by the look of some spaces and it seems that we’re undergoing the same issues that we had with the advent of web development at the end of the 90s which for the uninitiated consisted of a multitude of excessively long web pages covered in animated gif’s and midi music.
So why do I use it, well partly to stop the incessant mail from Bebo or Facebook asking me to join. what I failed to realise however, was that I was merely exchanging those emails for a whole new set of emails informing me of the latest actions of my increasingly large Facebook friends list.
I do not however subscribe to the adding of friends whom I do not know. Online friendships don’t sit well with me. To me it seems like a society with increasing issues of identity and self esteem looking for ways to connect without the feeling of insecurity of the real world. I point to World of Warcraft as a prime example.
Are people too scared to be themselves in real life for fear of persecution thus forcing them to turn to an online identity to express themselves?
Maybe I’m reading too much into this but I’ve spent alot of time trying to overcome my own insecurities and I think that you’ve got to get out there and meet people in real life. The fact that people have enough time to update their online profiles makes me wonder if people shouldn’t go and find other things to do.
On the other hand maybe I spend too much time playing and coaching Soccer… but then at least I’m getting out there and meeting people.
It seems to me that these online profile applications merely package up existing functionality in bright new funky packaging.
To give you an example, all these funky new phones that keep coming out with new features that you’ll supposedly want. I’ve lost count of the amount of people who will trade in a perfectly good relatively new phone for a brand new one with all the latest gadgets. At the end of the day a phone is a phone, you use it to call people (with the exception of the iPhone on which you can listen to music), I wont be trading my phone in for a while yet, it’s got an FM radio which is enough to keep me entertained on my walks to work.
Its the same with Facebook, Bebo etc.
I get comments, personal messages and a multitude of other messages that could just as easily be sent in an email, I do after all have access to my email for the large majority of every day.
