Knock on the sky and listen to the sound ~Zen Proverb
I have been doing a bit of that lately, the sound that comes back however is never the sound one wants, it usually emanates from the deleterious wasteland that the internet has become. Populated by the modern equivalence of reprehensible miscreants, whose sole purpose it would appear is to populate social networking and social games.
It has ever so slowly dawned on me that not only are these games such as second life, IMVU, YoVille, and Mini Planet to name a few, grandiose time sinks, they lead some of the players down the road of solely existing inside the game. It becomes much more than a simple past time of talking to friends and acquaintances to consuming their entire day and night schedule to the point of its all they do for all intents and purposes.
I have nothing against them, I’ve met some wonderful people on a couple of these games, but for the most part, they are occupied by the most egregious versions of vapid human detritus that one might muster a Stephen King quality nightmare to effectively fathom. The somewhat sentient bi-pedal hominids that are the greatest users of these social platforms are the ones who themselves have a hard time fathoming why the rest of us with a life outside the game can have a life outside the game. After all they manage to exist almost solely in the game, why shouldn’t we?
At one point I would make an appearance nightly on one of these grandiose time sinks. After, however, my other stuff that had taken precedence that day had been accomplished. So I viewed it much like going out on a Friday night, after working all week, putting up with the necessitated BS I got to go do something I enjoyed. Except, when one considers it in an intellectually honest manner, the vicariousness of the existence of the denizens that inhabit these areas is sufficient to give even the simplest among us pause in consideration of the utter waste in which they partake.
And it’s not just the games; it’s the whole social networking paradigm. 1984 and Brave New World were supposed to be warnings, not instruction manuals. Americans will on the one hand rail against big brother, (or in the current case big sister) taking naked pictures of you to get on an airplane, however, will happily post digitally vapid overtly drunken pictures for the world to see on their Facebook page, along with the obligatory “I’m so stoned” status update. What is worse is that invariably fifteen people who may or may not actually know this person will “like” their status. Have we sunk that low as a society that we must find countenance with our peers via some piece of software?
It would seem so, that we as a society no longer want, need, or desire contact with our “friends” except through the likes of Facebook, MySpace, or the myriad of other places one might find someone. It’s a shame that people know more about what’s happening in the lives of people they never met than they know about what’s happening in their own neighborhoods. The shear amount of drama that occurs in these places rivals that of daytime television. I’ll bet you any amount we can agree upon that you or someone you know knows the names of 5 people that are “friends” on some social networking site, but cannot tell you the names of the people that live on either side of them.
No wonder we have such a obesity epidemic in America now, we have become like the fat slobs in the movie surrogate, where you can be anyone you want to be, without leaving the house, where it was a shame that the protagonist had the same realization I have, I’d rather have one relationship in real life “meat space” than 10,000 on Facebook.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have real world things that need taken care of, I grow real plants, and fertilizer comes from the next county over, not some unknown individual whom I will never meet in real life.
