A social twit

It’s happened. I am now the proud owner of the following internet property: 2x Blogs, 1x Facebook Account, 1 Twitter Account, 1x Pinterest Account, 1x Flikr Account and various other worthless sites. I am a member of forums that I didn’t know existed, and my email is now constantly filled with useless emails which I have no idea where I subscribed to them, and worse still, no idea how to unsubscribe from them. All this has only happened in the past 2 years so I must have obviously been signing up to all these needless things and now realise something has to happen. Either I spend all my life checking and updating all these accounts to get as much use out of them as I can or delete them, so where do I start. Well let’s break it down and weigh up the pros and cons of each one.

Facebook: Do I really want a facebook account should be the question? The answer is no but unfortunately, it’s not as straight forward as that. No I don’t use it to keep in touch with long lost friends on a daily basis, but I do play poker on it which I rather enjoy. I also enjoy checking up on what everyone else is doing although this has now become quite tedious. Status Updates fall along very simple lines. Check your facebook page and I guarantee you will find all of the following:

Johnny Roberts had way too much to drink last night and doesn’t remember a thing.

Jane Doe would like to know where that traffic cone came from.

Richard Balls is sitting down enjoying a nice wine and a good movie tonight.

.uʍop ǝpısdn sı uosɯɐıllıʍ ʇɹǝdnɹ

Anyway you kind of get the jist. It’s all nonsense. I don’t really care how messed up you got the night before or how may sleeps you have till you go on your 46th holiday of the year. It is like you are trying to shove in my face how much better your life is. I also can’t stand the constant barrage of adverts, links and useless information posted by other people because they think it is interesting. Watching a malnourished Filipino boy singing Michael Jackson is not interesting, get over it.

Although saying all that I think I will keep my Facebook page. Facebook is like a fridge, you can’t do without one. When you are bored at home you keep opening the fridge to have a look to see if anything’s changed. You do this every 5 minutes and the majority of the time, nothing has changed unless you have been to the shops. See the similarity with Facebook?

Twitter: I signed up for it, I don’t use it, and I don’t think I will ever use it, although I do have a number of followers although I am not sure who they are. Probably some people generated by the Twitter engine to make you feel loved. What could I possibly say in 140 characters that would be even mildly interesting? I understand if you are a celebrity and want to keep in touch with all of your fans, sorry will rephrase that. I understand if you are a PR agent for a celebrity looking to justify your job and have figured out you can keep in touch with all their fans. I am generalizing though here as a few figures do “Twiit” sporadically. So am I going to deactivate my account? Probably not, because I feel that at some point I might use it, which is absolute bollocks, so I am not going to get rid of that as well.

There are various other sites out there which I use and don’t know whether I should keep them. I am not an even remotely good photographer although have grand visions of me being so, so will keep my flikr account and my pinterest account as well, mainly so that I can perve on women in sexy stockings. Of all the forums that I am on, I am not entirely sure how to get off them so I guess I am stuck with them. And one day I will find the unsubscribe button on all the newsletters that get sent to my inbox.

So after all that moaning, I am not actually going to do anything which leads me to my conclusion. We are all addicted to the internet, even though our addiction isn’t going to kill us, we are addicted nonetheless. How many of you spend all day in front of a computer at work and then go home and spend the rest of your evening pressing refresh on Facebook. What did we do before all this happened? Well some people did jigsaw puzzles; others took copious amounts of drugs. I spent most of my life in a pub, I don’t anymore because I am too busy checking my Facebook, sending emails to people that don’t actually exist, and trying to figure out how to unsubscribe from the Young Russian Goats newsletter that gets sent to my inbox every morning at 0900.