we have become so obsessed with the evolution of social networking that we forgot what evolution means.

i remember a time when everyone was still creaming their pants over their first gmail invite (yeah, you used to have to be invited to join gmail. it was a crazy time).

but even before that, there was a time when, if i had an AOL account, i could only send email to other AOL members... what? AOL. AOL, it was a service provider. A O L... America On-Li... ah forget it. you hipster kids and your google chromes. it's not like i just mentioned linux, or arpanet, or... arpanet... it was the government data sharing network that spawned the inter... ah forget it, you hipster kids and your snow leopard iPads.

look, this is why social networking is such a problem. everyone wants what's next, what's new, what's hot, but we don't care if it's an evolution, because we're too goddamn self centered and scatter brained to remember what we were just doing, anyway.

myspace is sooo last tuesday, it's totally facebook, now.

but do you even remember why you didn't like myspace? if you did, you wouldn't be on facebook either, because facebook was started up only one year after myspace, and was actually the more popular social networking site at first (none of them were spectacularly popular). the makers of myspace (you know, tom, that guy that forces you to be his friend?) admit that myspace's skyrocketing popularity (only a handful of years ago) basically only happened when they started copying facebook's concept (originally myspace was a data storage site, and geared toward musicians sharing their work online), and facebook's recent rise in popularity only happened when they copied myspace's copy of them (facebook was originally a way for ivy league students to connect and network, but the real money is in morons).

this is where we've failed. we've haven't been evolving, we've simply been revamping the same concept over and over. myspace, a place for musicians to store and share their music. facebook, a place for prestigious university students to connect and share the experience of wearing cable knit v neck sweaters and only having sex with girls that their republican secret society elders select and pay for. wayn (it's a social network, look it up) a place where world travelers can find hosts (and pot dealers) and make friends in order to streamline the couch hopping hippie experience. twitter, a place where realtime cultural chatter can be shared with the whole world all at once.

but it's all been dumbed down to one style of homogenous self entitling social network bullshit.

if we just look back a decade and a half, we can find the answer to the idiocy, and the distaste people have for particular social networks, and we can find our guide in the next evolutionary step for the internet.

step back to a world where i can have a hotmail account, you can have yahoo, sally can have gmail, and bill can host his own email through his business account.

a world where we can all exist on the net in different places, but remain connected to the same network. back when they opened up email hosts, i could get a letter from a gmail account and think, hey i just got mail from a pompous a-hole, or a letter from an AOL account and think, hey i just got mail from 1997. but the point is, we haven't connected the whole world with facebook, or myspace, we've partitioned ourselves off from anyone who doesn't want to be a part of one particular network that doesn't believe in privacy, or that won't stop inviting me to play internet mafia wars, or needs to know my mother's maiden name and what hours she is out of the house and which of her doors/windows is the most concealed from street view just to tell me which sex and the city character i am.

what we need to do is go old school. open the web up again to a place where i can have a wayn account (its a social network! look it up!) and you can have facebook, and sally can have myspace, and bill can host his own profile through his business account, and my homepage will host anyone from any network who is a friend of mine. the key change here is not that every social networking host become homogenous in order to ensure compatibility, but that we accept the fact that we may not be able to force other people to give a crap about us. it may be possible to mainstream things like status updates, or photo sharing, or chat, or notes/bulletins/etc, but the key is to highlight the differences as well, and i would actually prefer that. one thing that does bother me about facebook is how my homepage backlogged every single status update and every comment on every update and every "i like this" or "i don't like this" on and on and on. puke!

that doesn't mean that i don't want to stay connected to those people, or i don't appreciate having access to the parts of their lives that they want to share. i just want to be able to decide when i give a crap about that stuff, and not be put in a position where people can say, i know you read my status update, why didn't you comment, don't you care?

i would love to have a little place on the internet to call my own. a place where i can post some information about myself that i don't mind sharing, and have a little status/motto thing, and a profile picture, and a whole log of other photos, and maybe even some of my writings and animations and things, and it could keep me connected with the whole world, even my friends who prefer to do that through facebook, or myspace, or twitter (oh yeah, here it is...), i just don't want to do it the same way everyone else does it. i don't want you to buy me a virtual martini, or invite me to figure out what season of LOST i am, or all that crap, but you know, i also don't appreciate that facebook events don't work very well (or apparently, at all) when sent to an email address instead of a facebook account. it would be nice if we could all socially network with each other from our own different places. like how in the real world, you can come visit me where i live, and have a different experience that reflects who i am and where i'm from and what i'm interested in, and i can do the same with you. for us all to be connected via the same networking site is like we all live in some giant sterile barracks, where we can only choose from certain available forms of culture or experience. slowly but surely we all become afraid of life outside the walls, and we have to have people that are our "friends" there with us, if we are going to venture out. it's so scary out there, there's myspace monsters, and bebo people who live under the streets and eat little children who claim to be 13 to get facebook profiles.

but if we opened up the internet to become a world where your network and mine could exist in their own way, and my profile could be just exactly how i want it, and not just exactly how i want it within the parameters of what myspace wants it to be, we'd be a lot closer to the social networking world that i think we all want (or maybe we don't. maybe we all want to be drones in some sort of post apocalyptic 1984 style plug and play world where big brother decides what we can do, and how we do it, based on data they have collected from spying on us, but hey, if that's what you want...).

now, without getting too andy in my rooney, anyone who really has an interest in social networking, and opening up the world to truly individualized mobile shared expression would realize that the penultimate invention was the cell phone. it's actually much faster than online chat, email, or any of that crap, and you get to hear people's voices. the only real issue with using a phone instead of the web is that you can't edit or censor yourself before you put yourself out there, and you know what? you'll need to just suck it up and accept the fact that putting yourself out there is really only valid if you do it warts and all. everything else is just a plastic facade, and it's not really you. which is, along with privacy, one of the ills of social networking that can never be cured, so long as humans are what humans are, a majority of people will pretend to be something they are not in order to gain acceptance, and for various reasons, certain people will feel the need to collect data and personal information about you, and use it later for their own advantage. it's part of human nature, we are dishonest and nosy creatures.

and a quick note on human nature: to everyone who thinks that the track we are on is fine, that myspace was totally an upgrade from friendster, and facebook was totally an upgrade from myspace, and twitter was totally an upgrade from facebook, and that every time you switched to a new network you were allowed more freedom to be an individual, and a more authentic experience where people were less fake, and less self absorbed, know this, experts in the fields of business, and sociology, and psychology refer to the friendster/myspace, myspace/facebook, facebook/twitter changeovers as "flocking behavior", you're not doing anything unique, you're simply following the herd.

what's more, doesn't it seem like a wonderful world where we can all be connected and take ideas and experiences from our own lives, and bring them back to the hive, and those ideas will be picked up by others who like them, and then shared throughout the world?

it does kind of give me a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart to think of that sort of universal cultural and interpersonal exchange, but face it, that's not what we've created.

we haven't created a hive where all us little bees can bring our own flavor of honey, and make a great wide world of many flavors, and experiment with new flavors, and teach one another how to make this or that flavor, or why, where we come from, that is the flavor of choice, and tell me, why is the flavor of choice thus where you come from? and please help me experience what you have experienced. what we've created is a hive where corporation is the queen bee, and we all swarm to the hive to be given orders, and told what kind of honey we like, and what kind to make, and we don't need to know why, we just do it because the queen bee knows what's best, and then we take that homogenized world view, that single minded consumerism, that blind obedience, and we all fly back to our worlds and spread the pollen, and make the whole world one bland flavor of honey in new and improved packaging.

we have turned the human experience into one boring unisex brown shoe.