I checked again if you have shared anything new with the world, or the 28 people who follow you on Twitter! Your last tweet was “tea and biscuits” and that was yesterday! You have shared nothing else since you’ve had your tea and your biscuits.
You’ve blocked me on facebook because this is how you tell me you are angry; this is how you tell me we are through. And I, angered by your behaviour have withdrawn my following of your musings on Twitter; because this is how we express our anger, the changing in our feelings towards one another, we let each other out of our electronic lives, out of our electronic thoughts, this artificial cyber world we share with the our artificial cyber friends; flat pictures of themselves a year ago when their hair was different, or last month when they were on holiday to Venice, or their new born child, or their new born grandchild, or a flower, or their pet dog, or with their friends around a dinner table in a restaurant with the camera focused on the Chinese food and they all are doing the peace sign. Our facebook friends; some we’ve never met before, and some we have met only once, a very long time ago and we can hardly remember their voice or what it was we talked about and yet they sometimes share with us their most intimate secrets:
“I feel I am nothing, nobody, I don’t want to live” followed by a sad face using a colon and a bracket and in some cases an apostrophe to suggest a tear drop.
“My vibrator and I are very happy together, it’s the most fulfilling relationship I’ve ever had, and best of all it doesn’t hog the bed.. LOL” followed by a happy face with double brackets for exaggerated laughter.
Or those facebook friends who simply repeat the news, they repost news articles we’ve already read, or chose not to read because they’re too trivial or too disturbing. They are not sad, they are not happy, we never know what they are feeling or experiencing or going through, they never even tell us if they are having tea or biscuits! All they do is repost the news. They are our boring facebook friends, we never notice them when they are gone and when they are on facebook we never bother reading their old news posts about some celebrity giving birth to a baby and naming it Apple! Why on earth would you name your child after a fruit? Nobody knows.
Then there are our facebook friends who want to include us indirectly into their lives, they post their favourite songs, the song that represents their feelings on that particular day and they tell us to listen. They say: “listen, listen to this wonderful song” obliquely hinting that it express them well, and it is sad, or triumphant, or such an old song by one artist or the other and leaves us wondering why are they bothering with it so much, but we listen to it (sometimes) and we say something like “great song (kiss)” or “good choice (wink) (heart shape) (wink, wink)”. Because today it’s cooler to say: “I heart this”, than to say: “I love this”. Today, it’s cooler to ‘wink’ than to ‘smile’, it’s cooler to kiss than not to kiss. So we kiss and wink and heart each other, only we do it from a far, we don’t mean it, we’re not really kissing, we wouldn’t dare kiss if we were sitting opposite each other say at a cafe and you said: “here listen to this ancient song by the Smiths” and I would say: “great song” wink shamelessly at you, grab you by the collar and plant a dozen smooches on you, would I? It’s all unreal, artificial, flat, cyber, imaginary, one-sided, one dimension nothingness and we are swimming in it, every moment of the day. My flat faced friends in London post what a terrible day at work they are having at noon, but my flat faced friends in Shanghai have already ended their day and are posting pictures of the dinners they are making, whilst my flat faced friends in New York have just woken up and are posting poetic verses about the beauty of the morning light, the divinity of a new day written by dead poets who will never see the light or experience the divinity of the beginning of day.
Pushing through the news of war, riots, revolutions, oppression and corruption we post funny pictures, witty sayings and we steal them from our friends and repost them, always mentioning where we stole them from because that makes us ethical, we don’t steal without referencing unless we are poets, writers, politicians or academics of course. But here on facebook we call it sharing; sharing ideas not stealing them, always mentioning the source but telling it differently “Watch this it’s hilarious.. LOL” while our predecessor wrote: “This is tasteless” followed by many exclamation marks to emphasize the vulgarity and a riddled unsure face; an I don’t like this face, but I don’t want to appear like a total party pooper what do you think face.
We add new people and the number of our friends increases, we notice this, until it reaches a certain threshold then we stop noticing. Friends of friends; do we trust friends of friends? Yes we do, but do we trust everyone? No we don’t, so we hide, we hide information and reveal information, we’re not sure, not quite sure, it’s all very daunting.
Lucky for me even when you stop following someone on Twitter you can still see their activity. You still have not shared anything new with the world or with the 28 people who follow you on twitter, have you done nothing since you’ve had tea and biscuits?
