OKCOOL

I’ve finally succumbed to Facebook, I feel wrong. I’m now in a middle class nightmare; poking, wall tagging, sheep throwing and zombie biting all in a humdrum void that the TV once filled.

Is this really what it’s all about? Is this the place for that boy or girl at school, the one who always wanted to be the top cheerleader or the boy that wanted to be the captain of the football team but just wasn’t pretty/fast/strong/sexy enough.

It just seems so superficial. A collaborative soap opera of my friends and their friends, making new friends – WOW, Eastenders without any drama. Now don’t get me wrong the technology seems to be great, although it does seem to crash a bit, the tagging of photos is particularly interesting and I’m sure that many people actually use it as a useful tool for managing and reporting on events within their respective communities.

Yet, despite all of this puerile brain drain that it gives me, why do I keep checking it? What has it done to me? I really don’t care that “so and so” has updated their profile (again), yet for some reason I get a small serotonin release as I’m duly informed of another inane action by my friends.

Maybe it’s comparable to what Nintendo have done for gamers, Facebook has become the “casual geeks” application of choice. It’s seems to have drawn many people I know into using the web for more than christmas presents, email and a bit of online banking. They’ve found this freedom to express themselves without giving too much away, to become the “captain of the football team”, to just open themselves up a little bit more to people that they might not have before, something that the British have never seemed that good at compared to our American counterparts. Shit, maybe I’m too British.