you tweet so i won't spit in your coffee. i spit in your coffee anyway. tweet away...

recently i dropped my facebook account, and not in that ditzy, slutty way, like so many cell phones into so many night club toilets. with my past ditching of myspace, and my stand against twitter, this leaves me with no social network to speak of. i had a few asking me, "why?".

the following is not exactly the reason, as this happened, ironically, on the morning that i officially dumped fakesbook, and not at the moment i made the decision to do so.

i was reading in the news(paper. yeah, it totally still exists, i am as surprised as you are), and i don't know if i'd really call this news, but i was reading that online social networking has been evolving just fast enough to stay ahead of the proper development of social network etiquette.

it is certainly an interesting thought... that a form of socializing has been progressing so fast that we, i guess, forgot how to socialize.

i just want to grab the breaks on this story for a second, here. i should mention that the article was referring to facebooking, tweeting, texting, and pda to pda email, none of which should be considered a form of socializing. i should also mention that just above this article was an article about "how to get email in an outage", and these two articles were not in the tech or evenlifestyle sections, further distressing my hope for mankind. furthermore i would like to mention that i don't count myspace as immune to this phenomena, i had simply previously coined the phrase myspacin', as meaning: stopping everything to take a picture of yourself to prove you exist and are worthy of friends (see full definition below).

so what was the straw that broke the camel's network connection?

for the purposes of the following story (which is the purportedly true story used by the particular article in question) we will refer to the characters as midge and biff, and the baby will be a boy.

midge happened to get knocked up, and was planning on telling her friends "in person", by which she meant, sending them a picture message of her naked torso, with the symbol of the baby's sex painted on her stomach. to be fair, this is actually a pretty cool idea on midge's part. the problem is, midge happened by a party prior to breaking the news officially, and mentioned the baby's gender to biff, but also mentioned that she had not made the "official announcement" yet. at this point biff thought he had found the loophole that would allow him to make himself the center of attention for this story. biff did not tweet that "midge is having a boy!" but instead tweeted that "i just found out that midge is having a boy!"

get it?

biff didn't spill midge's beans about the bun in her oven, because he wasn't talking about midge. he was talking about himself. he heard that midge was having a boy, not midge heard that shewas having a boy. this isn't about midge's news, it's about biff's news.

consequently, because biff and midge are mutual web friends with many of the same people, including the rest of midge's short list of people who should hear the news directly from her, most of midge's closest friends heard the big news from biff, making them feel as though they had been dropped from her top8.

what just happened here that signals the end of interpersonal decorum?

in a world where we are raised to feel like we are all the center of our own little universe, we have found a way to convince ourselves that we are each actually the center of the entireuniverse.

you need to know what i'm doing right now.

your important life is less important than my important life.

but are we mature enough to admit that none of our lives is as important as facebook, twitter, myspace, et al tells us they are?

most of our lives are worth no more than a daily update for our closet loved ones, at best.

quite frankly, most (almost all) of us are entirely uninteresting until the weekend hits, and then we are only really interesting to a certain demographic of people, and probably only to a certain select group from that demographic, most of whom are probably the people we are hanging out with at the moment anyway.

if my stack of paperwork at the office is out of control, the only people who would really give a shit are the people at the office (if even them) so instead of tweeting to 1,500 people who aren't at your office, "this stack of paperwork at the office is out of control! :) lol", why not just shout, "this stack of paperwork is out of control!", that's even more direct connect than a tweet.

if the line at starbucks is taking forever, don't tweet, "ZOMG! this line at starbucks is taking forever. WTF??!" just open your mouth and say, "what the fuck? this line is taking forever!"

you know why this doesn't happen more often? because if you shouted "this stack of paperwork is out of control! lol" your responses wouldn't be in the vein of "work sux! let's go get some crantini margaritas! j/k! LOL! <3">

if you just blurted out, "what the fuck? this line is taking forever!" you wouldn't get, "starbucks on el camino? i know, it was hella long this morning. but the papaya passion-blue razzmatazz holiday melon mint croisscone is totally worth it! OMG! so good!" instead you would get a juicy wad of phlegm right between your coffee and steamed milk.

i decided to get out because i like risking soiled food to entertain a crowd (and i don't patronize starbucks anyway, so who cares?) but also because i hope that i can forge deeper relationships with those who want to play with me.

people, we are humans. we are social animals by nature. let's be social... for real, this time.

instead of sending virtual cocktails on facebook, real cocktails at the pub.

instead of tweets from hundreds, thousands of miles away, sarcastic comments to your face.

instead of "groups" "events" and "pages", real action, adventure, and real life.

this kind of behavior (that is to say, social networking) is not all bad. don't feel the need to follow me into the abyss. in fact, i think modern networking technology opens up some very interesting avenues for personal expression, such as midge's baby gender idea, and all sorts of artistic capacities. i just don't think that every single personal expression from every single person is interesting.

myspacin': (verb) photographing yourself for the sole purpose of posting it in a social networking venue.

this includes but is not limited to: the picture of yourself that you clearly took yourself (possibly with others), by reaching your hand out as far away from your body as possible, to give the impression that the picture was, in some way, someone else's idea. it also includes the picture in the mirror, which does not say, "i have friends, and i'm a good time" but instead screams, "i am so undesirable as a person, that i cannot even convince one person, one time, to take a picture of me, even as a favor. also, i am too stupid to simply use the timer on my camera, or, most times, to turn off the flash when taking a picture of a reflective surface." in addition, myspacin' includes the black and white "impromptu" picture of the man with the freshly shaven and oiled chest wearing little more than designer jeans and possibly a backwards hat, with a look on his face as if to say, "dude, bro, are you taking an artsy noir photo of me? i totally didn't know you were there. i was just in the other room, listening to maroon5, drinking michelob ultra, and busting out some military presses next to my poster of the two women kissing. that's what bithces think is hot, right? anyway, i was just in the other room, doing whatever bitches think is hot".