It was like one of those aliens opened its mouth and swallowed my computer. Suddenly I am confronted with more information about Joe than I'd bargained for and I was dumbstruck with the knowledge that this hockey puck has 610 friends. 610! Impossible! Well, then I started getting requests from people that I've never heard of who are friends of Joe and would like to possibly be friends with me.
Hold on!
Or, as they say at the Jewish Chronicle, "Hold the back page."
I am one of those guys who believes that if you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand, you are indeed fortunate. I don't think anyone could legitimately be interested in acquiring 610 "friends." other than Joe and the many others I see on these sites. It's pathetic! These web bandits are exhibiting behavior much like bird watchers who have been accumulating an ever expanding list of birds they have seen and the bigger the number the more impressed are their friends and fellow birders. It's like asking someone how many baseball cards they have or how many tunes they have on their i pod. It's insane and unnecessary information.
Having said all of that, the marketing guy inside me has to recognize that the sheer number of these sites indicates a desire for them by a large number of people. This is something that cannot be ignored. But, it does point out an apparent isolation and subsequent need that people who spend too much time in front the computer must be feeling. Why else would these sites be proliferating?
My young college friend Sally Amanda Balustrade (not her real name) thinks that these sites are causing young people to "squander their social capital." In other words, one doesn't have to work at developing relationships with people face to face. All you have to do is keep your personal site up to date and comment on the inane things people write in the "What are you doing right now" space on their page. Soon, they are going to tell us what they are really doing and it's either going to be great reading or nauseating. It will probably be both.
However, to every point there is a counter point. And here is mine.
I propose a site for people you don't like. They could include people from work, school, your family, your childhood and your fantasy life. After all the years of therapy, wouldn't you like to tell your imaginary friend that you have come to the conclusion that he/she stifled your childhood. And that you never understood that "special" language you two invented. We could call it FUB. FUB of course stands for F U Buddy. We could encourage the people we don't like and don't like us to join and we could spend the respite from sugar and spice land bashing these people and vice versa. We could post the absolute worst picture of our least favorite person and they could do the same. It could be a real competition. The friend business is not a challenge. Instead of sending winks, nudges and giggles, we could send piles of fecal matter and balloons containing noxious gases to these hose heads.
Who knows, FUB may surface one of these days from the dregs of the Internet, but in the meantime, I suspect that those nudges and winks and, yes, gooses, that you fling every day are never going to be quite the same after you've read this piece.
FUB, Brute!
