Before I start I will just give you two little stories to illustrate this post:
1) My darling friend Foxy Highflyer was recently due to meet a man for a date. He blew her out, pleading a backlog of work commitments, which would have been a perfectly good excuse - if he hadn't, the following day, updated his FaceBook page with the status "Mike is SO HUNGOVER after last night's big bash" (or similar).
2) My equally darling (and foxy) friend Ziggaaah has been seeing, on and off, a man who conveniently lives nearby, and the other morning on her way to work saw his alleged ex-girlfriend emerging from his house well before breakfast time, and his FaceBook status was the same day updated to "Frank is In A Relationship".
Wait! Come back! This wasn't meant to be a moan about MEN. What this is, and here I finally get to my point, is a moan about what we have decided to call LIFE 2.0.©
Life 2.0 is exactly like life, just more so, and more technologically enabled. After all, what these guys were doing is just the cyber-equivalent of getting their mate to "casually" tell you they're not looking for a long-term relationship, or "accidentally" leaving the receipt for a dirty weekend in their suit pocket for you to find. It's not, of course, restricted to the field of relationships. Forgetting your PIN number is the Life 2.0 equivalent of the cashier at the bank refusing to believe that that is your signature. Killing your Tamagotchi.. well, need I go on? I realise I'm in no position to comment, as having a blog doesn't really equate to anything old-style apart from writing a diary which, unless you're very careless, never gets read by anyone else, or maybe writing a newspaper column - except millions of us do it, which certainly isn't the case in the press. I have no idea what the moral of this observation is - and I doubt there actually is one - I suppose it's plus ça change, or something pithy about the equipment changing but not the operator...
18 comments:
It's an accurate observation. LIFE 2.0.© is taking over, except for things like birth certificates and dibbers, or when the gravitas of good, solid, dependable Life Basic is needed. For instance, I had to send myself some lyrics and a cd in a registered envelope today, so that it can be stored, sealed, as a poor man's proof of copyright. The date on a YouTube video or MySpace apparently won't do. Yet.
Anyway, I'm not going to change 'til the price comes down. Apparently Home Life Vista© is coming out soon, and it's bound to be full of glitches.
You ask me, that's one more reason why Facebook et al. are evil.
But there's no going back now.
It may not be a desire to give a subtle hint....could just be that some men are unbelievably stupid, and similar to the Darwin Awards, at least their behaviour gives us a warning ?
There now follows an appeasement statement
I freely admit, before anyone gets cross, that women are equally capable of being very stupid indeed.
BT - I quite fancy the idea of a pirated version of Life, but that's just acting or identity theft, isn't it...Can't we all go back to the DOS version? I often find myself closing and re-opening windows, but then I AM a smoker.
Rol - Oh I don't know, Facebook has its uses. I have family members I wouldn't even recognise if they didn't change their profile pictures every now and then.
TR- I was trying to make a gender-neutral statement. My mother would be proud of me....
If I remember rightly Marx wrote rather interestingly (in the Grundrisse?) about just this topic: how we have to adapt to technology rather than the other way round. The older you are the more difficult it becomes too. I fear that when my son eventually leaves home I'll completely stagnate technologically speaking, and as we seem to living more of our lives the 2.0 way that could mean I cease to exist altogether.
Ahh, yup get your point, I did appreciate the analogy but couldn't stop myself, sure that fulfils a stereotype somewhere ! My technical incompetance threatens to land me in all sorts of trouble on a regular basis, so guess I should head back to the candle and quill pen.......
BTW when are you off to sunnier climes, soon isn't it ?
Brilliant post - your LIFE 2.0 is evidently thought provoking and intelligent. Do hope that your LIFE 1.0 (or is it LIFE beta?) is as good if not better. I certainly aspire to having an admirable LIFE 2.0 and revel in the knowledge that in LIFE 2.0 I need not worry about bad breath or farting in bed or exploding zits though maybe bad speling is the equivalent form of these... see what I did there? However as with real life there is an ettiquette that the honourable tend to follow and it sounds like your friends have had the misfortune to meet up with some proper wretched cads indeed. Do hope they hit the delete button where they are concerned and look around for far more suitable downloads... ;-)
I am curious, as a largely neutral party and well out of the conflict, why any of my women friends assume any male behavior -- such as the left receipt, etc. -- is meant, even subconsciously, to communicate anything? As a man who's lived with the same man for 25 years, it seems safest to assume that we behave thoughtlessly until the exact moment when a thought occurs -- if and when it does, hence the "now in a relationship" update coming only moments after, shall we say? a conclusion was reached.
I don't know if this is Life 2.0 or just plain stupidity. I was living with a bloke and when I kept receiving phone calls at work from him, I realised that not only was he seeing someone else on the sly but that she had the same name as me. He'd got the numbers mixed up in his mobile and never sorted it out. I didn't know if he was too dumb to realise that I knew or was intentionally given me the clues...
What worries me about things like Facebook is what weird algorithm keeps suggesting friends for me that I didn't even know I had! It's like your mum wanting you to be play with the children of her friend. In Life 2.0, of course!
I've never 'done' Facebook or Bebo or any of those things where 300 people want to be your 'friend'. As for getting caught out in a lie, when I was younger I did my share of that but I'm such a useless liar that I'd forget my cover stories.
I'll wait for the patch for Life, the original and pass on the update.
Eryl - I think we absorb as much as we can and then reach saturation point. I can burn CDs and manage text-messaging and HTML etc- but I left MySpace because it was the Life 2.0 equivalent of a really trendy club full of teenagers playing music I didn't like, too loudly...
TR - Oh my god, you actually prefer Ye Lyfe to Life, don't you? I would love a quill pen if I didn't suspect it would sputter ink on my face. Holiday 28Feb - 15Mar. No idea about blog access but I'm sure the hotel has an internet caff...
Steve - They are resilient girls (and Northern with it) so have moved on, though not without a feeling of "How stupid did he think I WAS??". I've been careful not to let my virtual blogworld existence convince me that I am actually some pixie-nosed teenage Manga avatar of myself, tempting though it is.
usedbuyer 2.0 - You're already a 2.0 so I'm preaching to the choir. You have a good point there; most of the time it's lack of thought rather than subconscious Machiavellianism. And men do it no more often than women!
MM - yes but the man in question was a perfect example of the Academic 2.0 programme - which, as we all know from experience, won't operate on the same platform as Life 2.0.
Dotterel - Friends Reunited does that too. It tries to reunite you with people who actually weren't ever your friends, which kind of defeats the object...
FF - is a Life patch like a nicotine patch? If so, where can I get one???
So you're not a "pixie-nosed teenage Manga avatar"? Doh! I feel such a fool!
I've tagged you, I'm afraid. You've got to tell the blogosphere ten honest and interesting things about yourself. If you like.
Oh people really use Facebook in relationships and it winds me up. I watch "friends" leave updates that are clearly only meant for one person who they are arguing with or flirting with and it just looks so pathetic stuck there as an update. Why do they do it? And these are otherwise sensible adult people. I hope I never do that. I loathe Facebook actually and rarely remember to update it.
But yeah people are just the same - when I split up with Tracy, if we had both still been blogging it would have been like living in a small village and continually bumping into your ex in the PO queue (not that there would be a PO I suppose).
I have been watching this post with much interest and it strikes me as being a symptom of this day and age that so many people have obviously such strong feelings about the whole thing. Your analysis is as always intelligent and to the point!
Steve - oh all right, I admit it... I'm that teeny popsy from cult anime series "Sailor Moon". Don't tell anyone or they'll want my autograph.
RR - Thank you for the tag! Will do it as soon as I think of ten things I haven't already told y'all. You may have noticed I'm not exactly enigmatic...
RB - I know, and since I started blogging I use Facebook a lot less, although I have friends who contact me through it so I log on every now and then. MUCH prefer blogging though!
PS - Thank you! I suppose feelings run high because so many of us use it so often... given the choice between technology and perfume I'd stay unconnected and fragrant though.
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