Being beautiful does not grant you magnetism. Popularity does not grant you respect. But money can buy you a ticket on a smooth-rolling glory train into the blinding brilliant domain of status pro, eclipsing magnetism and respect out of the equation. The opposite is also true. Being a pro at consuming thirty-three hotdogs in five minutes can possibly grant you some kind of gravy train pass. And that’s cool for anyone who wants to be in the centre of a circle of friends to feed upon.
Mark Zukerburg based his "Hot Or Ugly" venture on the exploitation of gaps in network security. Much like a virus wears down the healthy cells of a body, like a hand in a glove, sand through the hourglass. As a natural course in his pectoral swelling, he built Facebook by exploiting the cracks in social interdependency. Providing that all classes of human flesh would be willing to invest their time (academic, artistic, professional, et al) in the half empty glass, the structure he would build would emerge from the world wide web as the link between real world associations and the comfort and ease of the personal desktop communications. In order to make “friends”, Zukerburg redefined phonebook searches to the simplest form: Like, Share, and Status.
What people reach for, what they hope to grasp through the web is their own business. You are the business: reseller, distributor, consumer and most of all, the product. The content you put forth and what you pull in is what is counted in hits. Who are you? Opinions? Art? Lists? Cracks? Any page you populate with tidbits be it on Wordpress, Huffington Post or, god forbid, MSN space, is what internet users guzzle, day in and day out. We sit in front of this screen and load information, then filter and sort through it in order to get the loot, the booty, the score, which is all user-defined and transitory.
PEARL SCRIPT
For now, let’s be friends, silently and disjointedly. I’m not looking to meet people on my way to the market. I want my friends to be available when I am ready to log into the relationship. I want my relationships to be neatly organised in groups by function. I want every group to have different levels of access to my real life. If I wanted to walk around with a sign defining any part of my personal life, I would be a roadside attraction. I think some information should be kept in a triangulated vault and have a minimum of code breakers aware of its existence.
“Excuse-us for inviting you in.”
Why would anyone want to offer, for free, a breadcrumb of personal data to the hitchhikers of the information highway? I imagine it is to sell a swell version of themselves. The one with the good side or the one highly developed side, such as a pro member, a bionic arm. Nobody puts up a profile to announce “I watch poorly recorded videos of big breasted women ten hours a day” or uploads pictures of their acne covered mug because all that does is reveal a chink in somebody's armour. If you don’t have talent, a voice or oversized limbs you better know how to share the hell out of the best of the net. Being a crème de la crème reporter of the LOL URLs will quickly duplicate your name across the web as a reference of all things trending. You will become the trend.
If you can’t do that, how will you ever make friends on the internet? If you don’t have friends on the internet, how will you interact with others? Who will care about your Old Spice vegetable puppet parody then?
Labels: collaborative, cult, social, suspicious activity here
