By ‘there’ of course I mean hunched over a computer screen in a spasm of social anxiety, feverently scanning for evidence that we’re loved, liked, or even just invited. If checking your facebook and myspace accounts were like eating a piece of fruit, I’d nail my 5-a-day by lunchtime.
Since we’re the first generation to take for granted the presence of mass global communications in our life’s, some would have it that we are the internetgeneration. Rubbish. Every cardiac-courting company exec to every thick-rimmed twitching caretaker in adult-land can email bad jokes to their friends and source decent beastiality with just as much efficiency as us. No, it’s the social networking phenomenon that defines us. We are the facebookgeneration.
Ever had a ‘grand-slam’? That’s when you log in to myspace and find you have one of each – a ‘friend added’, ‘new message’ and ‘new comment’ all at once. It’s like hoping for a decent haircut and realising when you stand up they’ve given you a new set of threads, some cool designer stubble and three inches on your dick as well. Of course it could turn out that the new friend is some awful band, the new message from an automated cam-whore and the comment an advert for some night you can’t afford to go to. In other words, the threads could be too small, the stubble could be ginger and your cock could still be way below the British average (5.6 inches).Still, one major achievement of the facebookgeneration is to have consolidated all those unique school-yard methods of letting someone know you fancy them - hair-pulling, name-calling, dead-arms – into a simple ‘poke button’. Hours otherwise wasted on posturing and goading reduced to a single mouse click, so we can all get on with the simple sex sum much quicker (proximity + alcohol).
Social networking websites also allow us to indulge our private fetish for post-break-up self-torture. The online equivalent to slashing your arm with a compass, checking your ex’s profile page for any shred of evidence that they have dared move on is surely a staple of modern young heart-break.
One positive thought is that it might just be the thing that keeps us all together. That in a vague, shopping-catalogue type of way at least, we will all be in touch forever, poking one another with our cyber-walking sticks and listing our health complaints under ‘interests’…
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