I like the petty #internet
A few days ago someone at work started a moan about how #Facebook just encourages people to post whatever they had for breakfast (curiously enough, in #social-networking what was once 'the most important meal of the day' is a symbol of pettiness). I made a sound of agreement, then thought better of it. Surely the problem of Facebook/other social networking sites is that people don't write what they had for breakfast anymore? What I find so off-putting and irrelevant is the constant stream of memes, quizzes, chain games (that seemed to have stepped into the place of chain letters - remember those? Send this e-mail to seven people or you will die in seven days...) and cross-posting. With the latter, perhaps I'm too picky, but I tend to scroll over cross-posted material unless the person cross-posting has contributed at least a sentence or two of commentary. There are news aggregators, feeds and subscription lists all over the internet...on social networking, I want to know: why do you want to reshare this? What is your take on this? Do you want to discuss it? As to the 'breakfast' posts, I participate in social networking because people are interesting and I want to know about their lives, their thoughts, their breakfasts. Where personal posting goes wrong is where it adopts the techniques of companies that use social networking for #marketing: except here the marketed product is someone's life. That's when it all becomes a glossy boastfest, and the #breakfast is no longer a breakfast, but a marker of a perfect existence.
