Social Networking

Social Networking is an amazing thing isn't it. For me, social networking started when I was about, say 14, when I first signed up to MSN Messenger, and remember loving filling out my profile on MSN spaces, which with hindsight is probably the worst 'profile' I've ever created. I then dabbled with Bebo and MySpace before finally settling on Facebook.

Things such as Facebook are really bizarre though if you think about it: it sort of breeds a million-and-one false pretences in one's mind. Let's take my profile for instance; I have - according to Facebook - 333 friends. The word 'friend' is one such pretence that can be empowering to a certain degree. I'd probably say that out of those 333 people, I'd probably say that no more than 50 of those are 'real' friends; from those 50, probably only half of those I keep in regular contact with.
The phenomenon named 'Facebook-stalking' can harm someone's self-esteem in a similar way to watching porn can create some form of inferiority complex. I've just clicked on a random profile, and this said person has 476 'friends'. Looking at their wall, they have had 4 wall posts in the last month: if you want me to do the maths, that's an average of around a post a week. From this arises the question 'do they have a life?' Or is it that they don't really have any friends? In contrast I've had 102 wall posts in the same period - yes, it took ages to count, and no I'm not bragging. Simple logic would dictate that I have more friends than person 'x', although it's this thinking that I take issue with. I know person 'x' to a certain extent and know that this person probably has a lot more of a social life than myself; it's more likely that this person rather socialises with people through different mediums - Bebo, mobile phone or face-to-face - than through Facebook.

This is just an example of the problem with social networking. I can create an inferiority complex with my social situation through just browsing through someone's profile, doing a bit of Facebook stalking. Indeed Facebook - although Myspace was more guilty of this - does also breed a level of self-importance in its users. The thing that I used to take issue with most with MySpace was making the profile private, and only viewable to your friends. I can understand if the person in question was some form of celebrity, even within their own field; when the person is just a horrible scenester who thinks that by putting their profile as private, they are expressing some form of superiority over the rest of MySpace users that we can see the inherent flaws in social networking. This was my main reason for changing from MySpace to Facebook.
I think that social networking - and giving users a space to express themselves - in general though breeds this same self-importance. I'm guilty of this self-importance myself; I think that people care about what I write on my profile; they are probably indifferent, or completely unaware of what's on my profile though. This blog itself is an expression of my self-importance; I think that what I have to say is important and people actually care what I say. What in fact will happen is that someone will see the link in the website section of my Facebook status, see this blog, and think pompous-prick. This blog however is for me, and me alone. I'm hoping that not many people read this, and I can use it as a space for me to write about things that I'm interested in.
So, yeah, if anyone does read this blog, please don't read it as me trying to reach out to the world and preach all my shit. Future entries will hopefully be more entertaining than this bullshit that I've written. I may put excerpts of things that I'm reading, find funny etc.. Or link off to websites or videos. Whatever. I'm going to stop writing now and hope no-one finds this, if they do, I'm sorry that I've wasted 5 minutes of your life.