"Just Love and Companionship"—and Cratering Self-Esteem

A really great BBC4 show, The IT Crowd, did an episode parodying Facebook, and the dangers and humiliations of wanting to end up reconnecting with your past, which after all you had probably let go for good reasons. Worse of course is the prospect of making any new connections, which are compared to plague germs just waiting to infest your face.

As the brilliant fake ad for Friendface says:

"Each Friendface page is like a petrie dish, filled with friendship germs. When you stick your face into the dish, you may come away with millions of other people attached to your face. That's right, it's basically a diseased face of friendship."

Just put your face in that big petrie dish of friendship—everything's fine!
After informing you that Friendface will infect you, will take all of your personal information and share it with whomever or whatever it wants, and oh yes, that it owns everything you put onto Friendface, just as Facebook was alleged to in an earlier version of its terms of service, the ad encourages you to forget all that and just remember the important thing:

"Now it's just love and companionship, and everything's fine!"

Yeah, well, maybe not.

In The IT Crowd episode, Roy, who has in the past had a number of one-night stands with women he'd just as soon forget, but who for some mysterious reason can't forget him, finds himself tracked down by an old one-nighter, a woman whose fragility was displayed to him when her troweled-in makeup mixed with her breakup tears and caused her to look like the Joker (Ledger brand).

He figures he'll just defriend her, and be done, but his nominal boss, Jen, tells him that's no way to treat the poor girl, and insists a physical brushoff is the only humane and manly gesture. Roy agrees, only to later have Jen point out to him that the girl might go mad if she's rejected in person. Roy and Jen and their co-worker Moss (whose main Friendface problem is that his mother friended him, so she can make sure he eats the lunch she makes for him every day) find life is not really all that fine having lots of trivial acquaintances which have to be managed as if they mattered.

Problem is, in today's absurd world, where your SN friend-count will soon be more important than your credit score, those trivial acquaintances do matter. And people are suffering real, if ridiculous, pain if total strangers reject their friend requests, or if they get defriended, you know because they're not really friends with the enormous list of strangers they've picked up in the friendship petrie dish.

So used to the casual affirmations and approvals of social networks, people now get very upset if somebody actually rejects their friend request, or worse, defriends them.

Now we learn that the pain of virtual rejection on a social network like Facebook is just as bad, if not worse, than if somebody dumps you in real life. How pathetic is that? People actually care, and are deeply hurt, if total strangers don't necessarily cotton up to them, just because they asked them to.

Jen, in an episode of The IT Crowd, trying to navigate the dangerous waters of Love and Companionship on Friendface till all hours.
So bad have things gotten on the self-esteem and promotion front that now there is this aid to being utterly obsessed with one's importance in the cosmos:

"This year, a third-party service launched Qwitter, which allows Twitter users to determine who's stopped following them and which tweet may have turned them off."

The great thing is, it doesn't really matter to people whether or not the "personality" or avatar on the other side of the digital gulf is real, or a droid or some sort. The rejection people feel at not being sufficiently included or affirmed is all the same.

On the other hand, a person might feel just as good about himself if he had 500 computer-generated, but very affirming and supportive, "friends" as the real thing. In fact, the droids would be ever so much better, since they would only say good things to and about you, would never defriend you, and would in fact attack any outsider you target as a threat to your fine-feelingness.

I suspect such a service—automated social supports (ASS) perhaps would be a good acronym—is just around the corner. And you'll pay any amount of money to obtain the advantages provided by these little bot friends, especially the ones who have real credentials for their little fake selves.

Hmm...possibilities...possibilities.

(jk)