Let's Face It

A few months ago, I did something I’m not very proud of. My only excuse was, everybody else was doing it, but that doesn’t make it right. And now, having done it, I feel foolish, chagrined and a little bit embarrassed.

That’s right, I opened a MySpace account.

It wasn’t my fault, really. Maintaining a web-presence is a tough business, and I’m already falling behind the curve by not having a blog, so jumping onto this bandwagon was something I felt I had to do.

I wanted MySpace to be useful, I really did, but the only good thing I can say about it is, if you need to get over the idea that you are young and hip and have friends, opening a MySpace account is the way to do it. Everywhere I looked I saw people younger than my children, with active social networks in the triple digits, having an apparently grand time interfacing with one another while I tried in vain to make some sense out of the place and watched my IN box flood over with "Friend Invitations" from scantily clad young ladies named Candi or Tanya offering untold titillation if I called their 1-900 numbers.

Naturally, I bolted. But, undaunted, or perhaps slow to learn, I opened a FaceBook account.

FaceBook appeared less of a virtual meat-market and was populated by a broader representation of age groupings, though I can’t understand why. While I feel significantly less harassed in FaceBook, I still don’t find it remotely useful.

Without actually meaning to, I have acquired a dozen or so 'friends,' yet my feelings of virtual social inadequacy continue unabated due to the fact that over half of them are total strangers. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer the type of communication that allows eye-contact. All these virtual social networks, ostensibly aimed at bringing us closer together, are really only driving us further apart. And it’s not as if we need their help.

Just look around you—on a train, sitting in the park, at a restaurant or just walking down the street—and you will see people immersed in their iPods, talking on their mobile phones, checking their e-mails on their CrackBerries, thumbing text messages or generally, desperately, seeking to communicate with someone, anyone, so long as it isn’t the person standing next to them.

I think that’s sad, not only because it has spawned a generation that believes “How R U? I M G8, C U L8R” constitutes a meaningful conversation, but also due to the inescapable fact that it is highly annoying.

I don’t know how this technology has played out in The States, but in Britain, no matter where you are, you can count on being serenaded by bleeps, blips and bells, as well as the countdown of the latest heavy metal hits, as various items of electronic gadgetry announce to their servants that it is time to pick them up and engage in loud and meaningless conversations with them.

Clearly I sound like the original grumpy old man miffed about this confusing, newfangled technology but, trust me, it isn’t that; it’s not about where our ability to be ‘connected’ 24/7 is taking us, it’s about what it’s leaving behind.

While on the train home from Birmingham the other day, surrounded by the requisite beeps and buzzes, I struggled to work out a particular plot point in my current novel. It concerned an obscure fact about World War II, which I needed to satisfy before I could move on. This left me a choice: wait until I got home so I could look it up on Wikipedia, or ask the gentleman in the flat-cap and tweed coat sitting next to me.

So I asked the man. He knew the answer, and filled me in on this bit of historical trivia. Then we talked about where he was during that time (in Burma, as it turns out, fighting the Japanese) and about driving steam trains, which he did after the war was over.

It was a diverting half hour, and a conversation I am not likely to forget.

None of this would have happened if I had allowed technology to intrude. Certainly I could have found the information on the Internet but pulling a cold fact out of cyber-space would have imbued it with the feeling my elderly acquaintance reported having when he drove one of the new electric locomotive engines: “It lacked life,” he told me, just as, I suspect, does much of today’s social interaction.

So it looks as if I'm stuck in this particular rest stop on the information highway; I may be a computer professional, but since I admittedly fail to comprehend the virtual fun of an Internet snowball fight, I guess I just don’t ‘get it.’ I am, it seems, doomed to be the only person on the planet who continues to post a web journal to a web page instead of BlogIt and who counts as friends only those people he can make eye contact with.

You can visit me at FaceBook if you like, as long as you're prepared for "Ozzie and Harriet" and not expecting "Friends" (the older episodes, when they were younger, hipper and hadn't started shagging each other).

Don't bother looking for me on MySpace, however. I only venture there about once a month to evict the porn-queen wanabees from my IN box.