Webupon

We all love a bit of Twitter or Facebook or Myspace. These sights have revolutionised our usage of the internet today and there isn’t a single person who has never had an account on a social networking site. Well, at least those people who can use the internet. Even though these sites end up with ridiculous numbers of visits everyday, I’ve compiled a list of things that I can only deem as crimes.

Friends

Why is it that we want 3872 friends when we only ever speak to about 10 of them? Okay, 20, tops! And the worst thing is, there is always a mini competition to see who has the most friends driven to such an extent that people make fake accounts and/or befriend strangers who are new to these social networking sites and probably don’t have a clue what’s happening

The Checking

Ever done that? Where you probably make a wall post or update your status message on Facebook or maybe just Tweet on Twitter and then log out and two minutes later, there’s something in your brain urging you to go and check your Facebook, Myspace or Twitter again so that you can reply back. And this continues, because you know that you have literally 15 minutes to get that very important train to Manchester but you didn’t bother because you were too busy commenting on someone’s wall post that basically explained why he or she had a marshmallow. And this doesn’t limit the annoying nature of checking, you always want to have a massive conversation on someone’s Facebook wall post or on Twitter. Take a break! Don’t let the urge take hold of you! No one’s life is at peril if you don’t check your Tweets or comments. Obama’s inauguration generated 5000 tweets per minute. Obsession or what?

Pictures

You HAVE to put up pictures of you baking a cake, or a random night out with your friends, or maybe just when you walked the dog. And this isn’t all, there’s a race to who puts their pictures of the night out first. Obviously, the person who puts it up first gets more picture comments! And yes, picture comments. Why do people update their statuses asking for picture comments? We DON’T care! It seems doubly petty when you get a picture comment back because you commented them. Also, please don’t tag me on pictures which do not have my face on it. Recently I got tagged as ‘Little Miss Rude’ on a Mr. Men and Little Miss picture. I don’t blame the person for tagging me that way. I was quite rude to him when he tagged me as Moe on the Simpsons picture.

Groups

I love being part of groups and clubs. But on Facebook and Bebo etc. it is a different thing. One hundered people make a group each on probably the same topic and that leaves me in a delirium as to which one I must join. Nevertheless, I join them all anyway. But then, I get a link by a friend to join a group. The group is titled ‘100 million members will create a world record”. NO IT WONT! There are only like 30 million members on Facebook so it isn’t going to happen! Not unless you create fake accounts, which a) doesn’t count because it’s unfair and b) is painful because fake accounts take a while to make – especially if there are about 70 million to make.

The Similarities

Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Twitter are all merging into one another – they really are. Slowly you can see that certain application and parts indigenous to one social networking site get very easily copied onto the other.  And the worst bit is, even though they slowly become into one another, we want to have an account in each and every one of them. The worst bit is, many more are slowly getting popularised so soon, we’ll want one in the other social networking sites too.

Glitzing It Up

We love glitzing up our Myspace or Bebo profiles don’t we? Oh, the choice of layouts and applications is just overwhelming. It’s the summer now and all I can see is some people spending literally a whole morning, indulging themselves in HTML tags and coding so that they can have the best profile in the world. I got told off because I used the default one. Can’t blame me, I was new to it all but after about 4 months, you start to realise the necessity to sparkle up that profile page and you become a victim to it.

A Way of Life

I despise the way the names of these social networking sites have become a part of our every day life. As a teenager, it is one of the prime ways of leisure. Not only that, as soon as us teenagers are back from school, we do need to go on these sites otherwise we’ll be deprived of basic human rights. Even though it’s only been 5 minutes since you came back from school, you have to find out what the others have done since they’ve reached home or on their bus ride back home. But these sites don’t limit their roles in our life to just that. I abhor the way they’ve become words. If you have to make plans for a Saturday night out and you’ve run out of time to discuss it, you’ll probably just say, “Oh, I’ll ‘Facebook’ you about it.” Not just that, celebrities loves to “Tweet” what they’ve been up to. I’ve looked in the Oxford English Dictionary and these words do not exist there! If it doesn’t exist in the dictionary then it probably shouldn’t be used! Get over it! And then there’s the commenting on different people’s behaviours on these sites. The tip of the iceberg being – “Oh look, she’s used text language.” or “Oh, she’s had a break up, I’ve GOT to find out.” or maybe even “They are going to a party and I haven’t been invited.” Users in the United States collectively spent 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook in April 2009. I can’t begin to imagine how much it would be for the entire year.

Well, those are just some of the ways that these sites really annoy me. They probably are a massive part of my life but these are just a few observations that I’ve conducted to support my claim that these sites are taking over our life! Why is it that we rely on cyber space to get us through the day? Can’t we just relax a bit and go out side and meet our friends if we really had this killing curiosity of talk to them? Or maybe phone call? Instead, we chose to resort to typing our way off to obesity by staying indoors until we are pasty in the face just because we want to keep in touch.

But maybe I am being too critical. We do excessively use these sites. They’ve set up their own businesses and are making millions out of the millions of users who spend millions of hours accessing these sites. These sites have done a lot of good in terms of how we use the internet. We can keep in touch over long distances. I can talk to my relatives who live in different parts of the world. I can get “pen pals” and improve my language skills. I can broaden my cultural horizons. I can keep in touch with my near and dear through a single click and nothing more.  I can use these sites as my instant messenger or maybe just a tool for leisure like listening to music or watching videos or using it as a gaming device. These sites have changed the way we use them and I applaud them for it.

However, the fact of the matter remains that we must encourage movement and the physical meeting of friendships rather than the cyber aspect of it. Personally, after this rant, I need a bit of “my space”.