So the Olympics start tomorrow. I promised I would write more about them but like the hippy in the shitty 80s teen movie I just want to freak you put and mess with your minds a bit. That’s why I have decided my pre opening ceremony blog will not be about how teary I get when I see someone from a war torn shithole win gold for weightlifting or how excited I am to see Blur play at the closing ceremony. This post is about social networking on the Internet. Deal with it.

The first time I ever used some kind of social networking app was towards the end of the 20^th century. It was ICQ and I was about 14. I would spend hours on it talking to girls I didn’t have the balls to speak to in person. I was a very awkward teenager. When I see teenage boys with any modicum of swagger I instantly assume they are future Patrick Bateman’s and if they don’t get offered the cha cha cha they’ll take it anyway. Basically I was so insecure and afraid of rejection that to approach any girl in the cold reality of real life was way too much of an ask. ICQ was the perfect outlet for the awkward and horny teenager. One could chat to a girl you kind of knew and it felt natural because you are at home and you don’t need to think about how you look, sound or act.

For those who never used ICQ it was just a chat device. Exactly the same as Facebook Chat but it looked like shit and it was prone to spam attacks. After a while I started using MSN messenger and that was far more user friendly. By the MSN days I had lost my man virginity and didn’t really feel those old inhibitions holding me back. MSN became more of a communication tool I would use to keep in touch with people I had met on internet forums and through various blogs I was writing for. It was simple and spam free and it didn’t look like a truckers jizz rag.

Anyway that all happened for a while and everyone was happy. One could make friends on the Internet and keep in touch with them through an instant messenger program or you could simply chat with friends and relatives without the use of a phone.

Then the darkness came.

MYSPACE.

It was a whole new thing. Public profiles with music and different colours and all that nonsense which just seems silly now. People could express who they really were online. Hell they even made you rank your friends, which is something to this day I find really perverse. Everyone did it though. Even me.

Everyone would volunteer personal information just so they could give an idea of themselves to people. Marital status, age, favourite bands, movies and quotes and all that. People wanted to show off how cool and awesome they were. You could even get sweet wallpapers to ‘pimp’ your site.

MySpace was cool for a while until Facebook came along and destroyed it. Facebook took the ‘social network’ elements of MySpace and expanded on it while making the layout much faster and a hell of a lot nicer to look at. Some people (former MySpace users) accused Facebook of lacking personality but those were the dickheads with the zebra print background image and their top 22 friends ranked in order from BBBFF to BBFF to BFF to just F, so we’ll forget about them. Facebook’s success is purely down to the fact that it became so popular. People the world over were frantically taking down pictures of themselves jacking meth into their eyeballs two years ago because their parents or grandparents just joined up. Everyone was on it and if they have known you at some stage in life (they didn’t have to like you) then you were socially obliged to be friends with them. It became the done thing. Again most people volunteered their personal info (relationship status, age, locale) as well as hundreds and hundreds of random photos. Basically the CIA’s wettest, filthiest dreams come true.

In my experience the worst thing about Facebook is the plethora of awkward social situations that would never have normally happened in the good old days are now just a click away. I shudder to think how many fights occur on Facebook Chat or how many people can have their dirty laundry sniffed and caressed by several hundred friends and acquaintances. Oh yeah and the cyber bullying people are always on about. It’s not cool. At the risk of sounding like some zit faced Orwell fan, Orwell predicted something like this. It’s happening and its worse than anyone ever imagined!

Anyway so I currently use Facebook and I feel it has become a necessity in my life in the same way having a mobile phone is a necessity. For all its fucked up evils, Facebook is a great communication tool.

Twitter on the other hand I see as a much more enjoyable indulgence.

If you want to see what your best buds, lets call them Travis and Skeeter, got up to on their recent trip to Cancun or whatever, use Facebook. If you want to hear Salman Rushdie’s opinions on American gun laws or read stupid shit footballers say then use Twitter.

NOTE: Also seems to work if you are a rapper and you want to sell your new line of alcoholic sorbets/condoms/iPad cases etc.

I enjoy twitter because I prefer the format of following people rather than being socially obligated to be ‘friends’ with people you couldn’t give two shits about (nobody in particular incase any of my Facebook friends are reading and think what I’m saying is about them, its not.)

Twitter also allows you to be part of conversations which nobody but people of the same interests need to follow as opposed to a Facebook newsfeed where you just have anything posted put in front of you just because someone you know has posted it.  That being said, the Facebook newsfeed is an amazing tool to have if you want to detect racists, lunatics or psychopaths among people you know. I should start a Facebook group called ‘That moment when you think you know someone and you think they are ok then they post some shit about “wishing the fuckin chinks would fuck right off” on their Facebook status and you notice that you are friends with proper racists’. Maybe not. Not very catchy is it?

Where social networking will be in five years is a mystery only time can solve. However if history is to be a guide then we are mega fucked. You will be able to live inside Facebook and Twitter and Facebook and Twitter will live inside all of us as if it were a vital organ. Your heart will miss a beat every single time a promoter for a club you don’t even like in a completely different city invites you to something you are completely not interested in going to. Your mind will throb every time someone posts a video proving Nicki Minaj is Illuminati. Personally a tear will fall from my eye every time someone likes a photo of something funny just because a stranger told them to like it. Oh I could go on but it just makes me sad…