Sunday, August 24, 2008

"Wanted naughty conversation" - Facebook faces the graduation from Innuendo to Direct

So Facebook now has the "pick up" brigade.

To be sure I worried about facebook a little while ago. About how it can do in friendships, create liaisons, destroy relationships. I have a few reservations - still unabated.

I am all for sustaining friendship - through laughter, sharing pictures, jokes, articles, conversation, serious moments, dear warm emails, mad comments; I am all for enjoying a virtual community of friends interacting with each other. I am all for maintaining relationships that in a 21st century world would die - with the scatterings of friends and family that we face. For that reason, Facebook can be great. I admit it. I am able to sustain friends with those whom I might never be able to keep in touch. Play scrabble (wotsit renamed thing) with friends. I can chat, say things, enter a discussion. With friends.

But what about the rest. The adverts that now get thrown in your face. They will increase I suspect. And then there were always those that were there for the kick of it. The innumerable randoms they pick up from cyber space - strangers walking in off cyber space into the rooms we sit in to become "virtual friends". The flirtations, the flatterings, the admiration for pictures, the trivial pursuits of "boost my ego". Then there are the random strangers who just enter your personal space and become virtual friends, creating a virtually real world, that makes you forget the real world that you belong to - the warm, loving, real things. You forget that in a conversation - the expression in the eyes matter, the tone of laughter or sadness in the voice mattrers, the gentle touch of a hand matters, a kiss and a hug matters. What matters now is the excitement of newness. Of strangers entering personal intimate space.

Also what I do not enjoy is the element of exhibitionism on Facebook. Especially when one is not interacting with just close friends and family. We are busy presenting our selves, putting on faces to meet the faces that we meet - to garble T S Eliot. We all succumb to that. Even in real life. But we get away with it much more online. We can wear our faces to suit the places that we visit in virtual reality. I am not sure what good it does us.

But yesterday, my reservations about Facebook took an all time low. I was looking for people to play scrabble-wotsit-renamed thing, looking at "host tables" and found the following invitations for the game: "lesbians only"; "naughty word game only"; "I am horny tonight - any ladies out there feeling the same"; "I am in a mood for a naughty conversation; "please make your picture visible for the game" (I didn't even know that was possible). This is FOR SCRABBLE? Please. If people want to pick up online shag possibilities, why do they not go to the sites that offer it. Why bring it into the scrabble arena?

I still stick with Facebook for the sake of the close dear people and good friends I have on it - and with whom it enables me to connect in a deeper and more engaging way. But I have reservations all the time - discomfort at what Facebook is generating in this world, and the possible effect it has on our lives on the long term.

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