"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)

To Hell With Books, Give Me Data!

Regarding: Kindles Replace Books In Library.

Humans, being the hopeless victims of distraction they are, have turned libraries into giant—REALLY giant—statements about the extent of their commitment to being learned, or at least their commitment to providing the dweebs who want to read a book with somewhere to mingle and not be seen or smelled by normal people.

I say this is being really distracted, because books are simply data conveyances, like bio-terroristic hard drives, which munch up living things called trees to provide people with incredibly inefficient ways to get at the data contained in one lousy book. Stack up a bunch of these books in a warehouse, and let people check them out, and you have a library. Hell, stack them up in your house, and you have a library. And a lot of dweebs are very impressed with their home libraries. I knew a fellow once who measured his in linear feet of biblio-virtue.

And more than this, we have these special libraries, much more prestigious than the usual ones, where they house the rare books, the special books, and especially the rotting, stinking books nobody should see or smell or ever touch. That is why they make you wear those silly white gloves and masks, like you're dissecting an especially diseased toad, which is a fair description of the contents of a lot of the special-and-rare items, and for that matter most books ever written.

At the research libraries, the worship of books, and other junk, is elevated to a great height of utter arrogance and insanity. While people in this country could use some space to actually live in, could use some $ to help out in rough times, research libraries have bunches of space devoted to housing a massive clutter of old, allegedly valuable, foul artifacts, almost all of which could be converted into digital forms, and the space and the air cleansed for better purposes.

Many years ago, I saw this wave coming. I could see how much more efficient it would be if I did not have to go to a big, pretentious, physical building to access the temple of rare books. And more than this how much better would it be if ALL the resources of the library which could be digitized were, and made available to everybody, all at once! Wouldn't that be something like a major advance of civilization?

So, I mentioned that to one of the librarians at the Harry Ransom Center, that wouldn't it be great when we can digitize all these awful stinky old books, so people won't have to physically encounter their rotting corpses anymore? She looked at me as if I had suggested burning down the library, with her inside as a marshmallow. Let's just say she wasn't on the bleeding edge when it came to progress.

Well, now we have finally arrived at that moment I have been hoping for, when libraries are dumping the books, and going digital, and naturally the book fetishists are going crazy, acting like the poor books, which last time I checked a digital resource about this, don't have nervous systems or feelings, are being abused! And worse, the fellow who wants to dump the books, and just hand out Kindles to everybody, has also put up big-screen televisions at the entrance to the library, so people can watch cable channels. And the reaction to this is to accuse him of having not read 1984. Well, of course he has. He just actually got the point of the book, unlike the dummies who took it as some kind of warning about something.

So, just pick up your hands, and wave goodbye. The ancient world and its faulty, fumy forms are finally, thankfully, dying.

And who wants to read a book, anyway?

(jk)

Turns Out "Baby Einstein" Was Really Stupid

At least, it was lamebrained for parents to think they could engenius their babies by immersing them in video bowls of smart-pops. So badly did the whole baby-media ploy turn out that Disney (which acquired Baby Einstein in 2001) is offering customers refunds.

Maybe someday parents can utterly abandon parenting and just plug their brats into the Matrix and have them seem really smart. But then, with everybody an Einstein, or seemingly so, being a genius will have to be redefined as something better than "smart as Einstein". It will have to be upgraded, and so all the Einstein-level smart people will still not be affirmed in their specialness.

They'll just be one more E-level slug, wishing they had good parents that could have afforded a better simulation in the Matrix.

(jk)

Monsters On The March!

Nope, that isn't a notice concerning the next meeting of the Republican National Committee, but it is a notice that there is a new website you may like:

Monsters on the March!

As I noted on Facebook, it has a strangely familiar tone and attitude.

(jk)