Sunday 11 October 2009

Sheeple!

Gosh. As the weeks go by and school pressure starts to pile up, not only because the curriculum dictates so but because people are not really people but sheeple instead, there's a serious spike in stupid, whiny behaviour. Especially on Facebook. Facebook is turning really trashy by the way, but I'll address that later.

A posts the status on Facebook saying, "omg, week 9... wish i could just fuck off from smu and die... so stress" and immediately what he gets is positive reinforcement with B clicking on the thumbs up button and commenting, "yeah man, me too" or C commenting, "smu seriously sucks la". It is fundamentally:
  1. One-up-manship in seeing who is most stressed out and worried about school,
  2. A community built around misery.
What kind of life is that? Suddenly it just seems cool to rejoice in being so damn unapologetically bogged down by school work and grades, because honestly it's all about the social validation.


On a side note, I really criiiiiinnnnge when people comment on break-up notices.


The quality of stuff that's on Facebook is also ostensibly going downhill, and while it's nobody's fault, everybody's actions has indirectly led to this. I think the reality usually goes like this: The ratio of crap to quality of anything in life is usually an 8:2. That hasn't really been a problem in the past because most of the time the 80% of noise made out there couldn't be heard. But because Facebook puts every small thing in the limelight, the amount of nonsense suddenly just gets lots of air-time and screams in thy face. Admittedly, I used to contribute to what it is today because I did share videos that I thought were really funny, but now I think there's no point anymore.

Google has recently released a new communication platform that apparently combines its email system with an interface that resembles Facebook, called Wave. It appears to look like a huge cross between email, SMS and MSN, where integration is key.

With the advent of Blackberrys making it so easy to get and stay connected such that MSNing and SMSing are like the same thing and people can always remain online, I think we are all indeed going to be more connected quantitatively, but my guess is that there's gonna be a big list of online people with very little talking going on.

I still appreciate communicating over a mug of beer with real people very much instead.

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