Cookies and Capacitors

Well, this is embarassing

Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 6:35PM

I just viewed a documentary titled We Live in Public; it startles me. The film is about how Josh Harris predicted we would be living our lives publicly online, available for all to see. What I am typing, nay, sharing publicly, right now is what he expected. I have some points that I’ve though about long before I saw this film, and actually what I base my values on.

I will not publicly declare a person my friend via Facebook.com unless I know said person and have communicated verbally with them before. However, I stand in the minority on this. Millions of people, perhaps more than ninety-percent of Facebook’s users, add whoever the fuck they want and the one being requested adds them for social benefit. These people are attention whores who thrive on comments and the number of virtual friends they have. I estimate these people have little or no close, personal relationships with others as they are obsessed with maximizing their numbers, one fucking little digit, rather than developing those who already belong in their lives.

“People gauge their self-worth with how many Facebook friends they have.”

They unfortunately see their ‘friends’ as a number. A little character on their profile page, whom they would never care to speak to ever again in their pathetic lives. It’s a horrible world we live in, and most of us live more online than in reality: the presence of meaningful others. Everyone has become a slave to their keyboard and monitor, addicted to what others think of them. They are so concerned with what others think of them, they share whatever they are doing, even if they know that one particular experience they shared via Twitter or Facebook or text or what have them is complete bush-league that nobody cares about. But they, themselves, don’t care: it’s all about a meaningless little ‘like’ appearing below their words.

They are attention whores, and they are dramatically changing society. Relationship communication is changing. Work environments are changing. Language is changing. Time is changing. Culture is evolving so rapidly that the old are unable to assimilate in new trends, and the young already need to catch up on their digit’s lives (which they care more about than their own). These slaves are shaping the world more than I’d like, and I would hate to see the world collapse on itself with such stupidity.

What happens when the human race becomes extinct? Are we remembered; by whom? If I am to be part of the last people on Earth, I would rather be one to respect what the past has done for society than wreck our cultural foundation with a quick keystroke.