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What got me thinking about this subject wasn’t just the natural cynicism that has developed nicely over the years but my recent membership of Twitter.

I thought I would see what all the hype was about so I joined, wrote several entries and waited to see how many followers I got.  It didn’t take long for my first follower.  Now after a couple of weeks, I have quite a crowd growing.  Now you would think all these fans would please me and at first I was proud that my literary talents were in so much demand, especially when one of my first followers was the Daily Express!  I wondered if they would see the genius in my musings, contact me and offer me a job writing articles for them.  How naive!  I may have cynicism down to a fine art but worldly wisdom seems to take time to mature.

Then I got a couple of entrepreneurs following me and pondered that their interest may be of a lucrative one and invite me to join them on their next venture by using what I was now beginning to believe was outstanding penmanship on my part.  However, after my followers had written their first few entries on plugging their products, selling their services and promoting their wares, I discovered a strange pattern emerging.  Following these ten or so entries they then began to repeat themselves.  Exactly the same wording was being placed in their entries.  It was then that I realised that here was what can only be described as spam or junk mail.

How rude of these people to entice me into following them through my own pride and self importance and then bombard me with advertisements.  Another cunning ruse these ’sirens of cyber space’ use is to place a photograph of a rather stunning young woman as their profile picture so as to allow you to think that not only are you the next J. K. Rowling but you’re obviously a sexy kind of guy to get these lovelies following your twitterings!  Needless to say I have stopped following almost all of the people I had following me.  I even came across one follower who had the face of a sex goddess, had only made one entry describing ‘her’ website URL where ’she’ sold her products and had several thousand followers!  Oh foolish comrades, how we are hounded by the ’fast buck brigade’.

All of this then got me thinking of other intrusions, scams and unscrupulous doings of ‘cyber-spivs’.  If you have ever had the frustration of trying to purchase tickets to your favourite band’s gig only to discover they have all sold out in under five minutes, then noticed on ‘E-Bay’ that they are all on sale for five times the original amount, then you will know where I am headed.

These examples are just the very utmost pinnacle of the proverbial ice-burg.  As new technologies emerge, there will always be the darker element of society willing to adapt their shallow morals to continue lucratively abusing the rest of us. 

Beware!