In the pre-internet days neither of us would have even thought of calling each other friends. We’d have called ourselves friends of friends who met once and yet, for some reason, kept sending each other grammatically challenged, inappropriately flirty letters with photos of ourselves attached. Police might have gotten involved.
But now we are definitively friends, having taken public vow on friendship on friend-based websites, wearing meta-phorical friendship bracelets on the earnest Facebook, Orkut etc. You message me and comment about me and write on my walls and dedicate songs to me and invite me to join groups. More than once you have taken it upon yourself to poke me.
This is hard to say to a friend, but our relationship is starting to take too much time. Its weird that I know more about you than I do about my actual friends that I hang out with in person- whom I propose to distinguish by calling non-metafriends. In fact I know more about you than I know about myself.
Also you’re a bit aggressive in our friendship. Would a non-metafriend call me up and say” Hey! Guess what? I have a bunch of new pictures of me?” or tell that he has coloured on the map all the places he has been to. Its as if I suddenly met a new group of people who were all in the special classes.
The horror is, I cant opt out. Just as I cant stop making money or my metafriends will have more stuff than I do, I cant stop running up my tally of Orkut friends or I will be a loser. Just as money made wealth quantifiable social networks have provided a metric of popularity.
I am sure social networks serves many a functions that improve our lives, such as reconnecting us with our old friends and finding out that the people we used to date are still good looking. And all networks have a messaging function, which would have made an excellent way of sending messages if no one invented e-mail.
But frankly these sites are not about connecting or reconnecting, its all about Self- branding. We’re not sharing things which we don’t want others to know. We are showing our best posed, retouched photos. We’re listing the Pynchon Books we want to think we have read all the way through. We’re allowing others to write whatever they want about us on our walls, unless we don’t like it, in which case we erase it. If we had so much privacy in real life the bathrooms at the Mumbai airport would be empty.
And like the abrasively direct ads for soaps and cleaning products at the beginning of the advertising age, our self branding is none too subtle. We’re a blunt lot, in our bikinis and our demands that our friends go right now to check out our blog postings. We are, as a social network, all so awesome that we will soon not be able to type the number 1, because we will have worn out the exclamation mark that shares its key.
Until we come out with something where we can portray our true flawed selves – perhaps a genius could invent something that takes place in the house over dinner with wine-I say we strip down our online communities to just the important ones.
With enough venture funding- by which I mean the volunteer services of a dude who knows how to make a website- I hope to launch a Truestatus.com on which people are allowed to submit their names, their occupation, a photo, a square footage of their home and a list of any celebrities they happen to know. Then other people can vote from the scale of 1 to 100 on how awesome they are. At the end of the year the ones with the most n. of votes are made the king and queen, which if I remember correctly, should send their scores plummeting. If nothing else, it should finally rid us of Tila Tequila.
Inspired from Joel Stein- TIME magazine
