Tuesday, April 10, 2007

A foul trap for all the cyber-innocents

Published: 10 April 2007

I woke up on Easter Sunday, and checked my email. I found some MySpace friend requests, which I felt I should reply to, and then checked my profile on Facebook, where I saw I had been invited to join Twitter, so I clicked on the link and then ... Well, by the time I logged out it was almost Easter Monday. Christ had died and risen and all I had done was approve a few friend requests and deleted an inane message from a man from Oregon. And lo, I was filled with a great hatred of the online networking community.

Joining Facebook is a bit like applying a leech to your lifeblood. This is a social networking site with more than 10 million members worldwide, which only goes to show what danger there is in numbers. You begin casually, just browsing. But you can't browse unless you start a profile. A "profile". It sounds so simple, so effortless. Be warned! This is the end of bank holidays spent in the sunshine, chasing rabbits and watching little things grow. It is the beginning of myopia, agoraphobia and days in the dark in your pyjamas.

But because you are a cyber-innocent, you create a "profile". As you do so, it sucks all the addresses out of your email account, so that you can be in touch with all the people you are already in touch with, but on a parallel internet site. Instead of one account to keep on top of, you now have two to check; more, if, like me you are fool enough to log into more than one different networking group. Can you smell the stench of futility that hangs over the whole system yet? continue...

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