Self Deluded Cranium Dump

My friends may be surprised at this blog entry's title (Facebook IS EVIL, it is!!). After all, I'm the man who would nominally have extraneous flesh removed and Facebook surgically transplanted onto my left buttock, if such a drastic operation existed. But that's exactly my point. I used to fucking hate social networking websites. MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, MyArse, Sexually-Transmitted-Diseases-Sharers-Reunited. Now FacialBook has taken over my life - bastard stupid thing. Here are the ten rules of Facebook (or FB, as it will henceforth be known, as the pointless abbreviation that everything is in the Web community) that I've created.

1) Facebook is a Vacuity of Life and Everything (A VOLE).  Keep careful note of that phrase/acronym, as I will employ it again. A VOLE is a passtime that will never win you a Nobel Peace Prize, or enable you to be a Grammy Award winning singer/songwriter or even help you finish DIY tasks in your flat, such as washing a plate.

2) Facebook, MySpace and Bebo (along with Enemies Reunited and the like) are not social networking websites. They're anti-social networking tools. You can pretend to socialise with your mates online by incessantly Poking them, but let's face it - nothing quite beats the immediacy of a really good meal, a night down the pub or casual sex in the multiplex. In addition, MySpace has a geeky or musician cache value. Peering at friends on MySpace makes me feel like the musically illiterate slob, sitting in the middle of several casually talented artistes who could yawn out an aria or fart out a symphony in their sleep.

Meanwhile, I only logged in once a week on Bebo when I realised I felt like a middle-aged Uncle standing in the middle of my 14-year-old niece's disco, with a fixed half-smile during a Pussycat Dolls number - impressive stuff, considering I don't have a niece. I stopped using Bebo altogether when I glanced accidentally at public photos of some teenage girls in a nightclub called Spank in Doncaster. Logging off was probably a good idea at this point, since I didn't fancy being detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure for being a suspected nonce.

Finally, FB came along, when a mate of mine tagged me on a drunken night out - surely the usual and stereotypical way of joining the damned tool. I stared transfixed at the inebriated fool in the photo, precariously balancing several pints on his left elbow, before realising in abject horror that the idiot was me.

It was several months of photo tagging before I reached this monstrosity of forgotten embarrassment. I have no memories of this. Although my friend in the floppy Santa hat and the dressing gown tells me the rohypnol worked a treat.

3) Never ever use FB if you're ill or unemployed. The best analogy of this is by comparing it to "This Morning" (or any other generic morning daytime telly show). By rights, you should be convalescing in bed or reading a book. Something toward making you a healthy human being again, physically and mentally. Don't fritter away the remnants of your life by answering questions in a personality survey that will conclude that you're suffering neuroses that psychiatrists haven't even discovered yet. Plus, if you're unemployed and on the computer, try getting a job on Jobserve - avoid logging into FB to find out if you tick all the boxes for a typical Capricorn. In the latter case, you might as well be watching "This Morning's" Denise Roberts (or whatever the frig her name is) dispensing invaluable advice on fashion tips for the perfect Capricornian viewer. By the way, I should add that daytime telly is another VOLE.

4) Friends competition? Goddammit, fuck everyone else - FB is a popularity contest, where you out-do each other with the number of friends you've got on your list. Charlie Brooker (about whom, more later) wrote about this rather curious phenomenon. You'd do a lot more for your popularity if you travelled the country or even (gasp!) the planet Earth and bought a drink/meal for even one of those people, rather than stare in nervous trepidation at the profile photo of one of your friends breakdancing. I've got 138 friends at the moment - a respectable number, you might say. Except that's all the friends I've made throughout my time on Earth, including school friends I haven't seen in over 16 years. Which leads neatly onto...

5) Time-trip into your school childhood. School was the best days of your life, right? Actually, wrong. Everybody had, at the very least, a slightly rubbish time - even including the pretty popular pupils. I should know, I've got the two "school prom queens" on my list. One's claiming she'll never reach a calm serene nirvana as she's too volatile and she's dealing with this by playing a Facebook movie quiz. She barely remembers school. The other is a police officer with a penchant for Buddhist philosophy, who comes home after a day of post-mortems, sweaty rapists and Sir Ian Blair imposed paperwork and remembers her school days as when she had a "monobrow and waxing didn't exist".

Actually, this point is perhaps the most important - so, it's odd that I've put it at number 5. Surely it should be number 1? Hit the reader with the most important first. Or number 10? The reader is a gibbering mess, vowing never to touch FB with a moribund digit and is kicked to death by this final salient point. Well, dear blog reader, point number 5 will get its very own blog entry in a few days time, such is the totality of squirming embarrassment and mesmerising misunderstanding that has been provoked by a gap of over 15 years.

6) The first rule of Facebook is that you don't talk about Facebook. The second rule of Facebook is that you DO NOT TALK ABOUT FACEBOOK. "Okay, Chris, you numerically dyslexic halfwit, you've already got a first rule and second rule; plus, you don't have to paraphrase Brad Pitt, you'll just look stupid and look like you spend most of your life doing movie quizzes with the bird from point 5". So, to put it bluntly, this FB rule means you start talking like an idiot. At least with MySpace and Bebo, there is a relatively 'normal' vocabulary. Although kids who normally use Bebo have usually lost the power of speech by the sheer amount of mobile phone texting and masturbating that they do. I realised how idiotic the whole thing was when, without a flicker of embarrassment, I engaged in a serious conversation with a fellow worker about her zombie attacking my Slayer, while dribbling about the new My Personality app that just "yeah, totally understands me and my inner criminal" - since when did I become a cyber-New-Age-gangster dork?

7) Okay, so there are the stupid apps, the one that make you gibber uncontrollably about throwing a sheep at one of your friends in Greece. Meanwhile, your Greek friend is really wanting to know about your life after a decade of not seeing you, so you express your love by chucking a non-existent virtual ovine mammal at them. But then there's the danger of the really good apps, because they're worse - they're another example of the VOLE, albeit a slightly more stimulating one. This FB rule is the one I'm probably most guilty of breaking. Okay, I can make the lazy excuse that I'm insomniac and it's absolutely vital that I play 8 games of Scrabulous (online FB Scrabble) to help me sleep. But that maybe explains why I'm being cheerfully thrashed at all those games - blearily-eyed at 2am in the morning with only the word "TIT" to put on the board, while my opponent has strategically put together "OMNISCIENT" on a triple-word score isn't conducive to good sleep or a good game. It's for those reasons I installed Texas Hold 'Em Poker (sent to me from my serene Movie Quiz queen from point 5) and then quickly de-installed it - I essentially realised I'd be stapled to my keyboard from now till eternity if I'd put that on my FB profile.

8) The drunken FB rampage. It speaks volumes that there is now a FB Group that you can join if you've logged onto FB after consuming levels of alcohol that impair any sort of objective sensible judgement and you want to confess your sins. This is the 21st century equivalent of the drunken late night phone call to the ex. You wake up in the morning after a FB drunken rampage and stare in startled bewilderment at the number of people you've Poked (including complete strangers). Also, it seemed like an utterly hilarious thing to do at the time, yet the cold morning shines a light on the rank stupidity of buying a virtual cocktail for a close female friend. Sixty times. Additionally, the drink is usually called something original like "Sexed Up Zombie Pissing On A Beach".

Also, if it ever gets to the stage where I stagger in through my front door, late at night and with a head full of Chablis, gaze at My Aquarium on FB ("Oooh, pretty colours"), wake up the following morning and find my real aquarium full of actual dead fish, neglected in favour of virtual octopi and Pink Flippers, I know I need to cut the wires to my machine. The warning signs will also be present if I ever start adding people to my Friends list that I'd never do if sober. Either someone I quite fancy, but who barely notices my existence in the real world. Or someone I recognise, but can't quite figure out why. Which leads neatly onto...

9) Befriending "famous people" or "celebs". I haven't actually reached this step yet, but others have. I came dangerously close last week, when I realised that a childhood friend was FB pals with Grace Dent and, by proximity, Charlie Brooker. To explain briefly, Grace Dent and Charlie Brooker are both incredibly astute journalists that casually blow out chunks of TV media, so we (the TV viewing dead-eyed masses) can swallow them in bite-sized morsels glistening in vitriol - useful, when it comes to something like TV's "Big Brother" (another example of a VOLE, and possibly due for a blog entry of its own). Charlie Brooker, incidentally, wrote a blog piece on Facebook too, which is probably way funnier than this one. But he's a paid journalist by The Guardian, while I'm an I.T. Web Worker with all the social sophistication of Simon Cowell's potty. Simon Cowell, incidentally, is the human personification of a VOLE. Don't ever drunkenly befriend him on FB, otherwise you might as well kiss goodbye to any dangling threads of self-dignity you ever had after breaking all these ten FB rules.

10) Big Brother is watching you. No, not the VOLE "Big Brother" (see point 9), but the original Orwellian Big Brother. This isn't, strictly speaking, a FB rule. But I felt obliged to provide ten rules. 'Cos there's always ten rules for everything - I guess we all logically like round numbers. I was chatting to one of my best friends last weekend. In the real world. In his actual flat. As opposed to on FB - see, I am getting better. He works in I.T. too. He observed, with a rather balanced note of concern in his voice, that a lot of the applications on FB suck up a helluva lot of personal data. A heck of a lot.

Even scarier is the fact that you might want to uninstall something like the Vampires application (and, let's face it, a lot of us have - a prototypical VOLE FB app). Spookily, every now and again, the now supposedly extinct application still seems to chug back into life, when a fellow friend's Queen Catholic Girl Mistress Dominatrix Arse-Gravy Vampire decides to up her vamp points by swiping a talon in your general direction. How do you get rid of the fucking thing? Via some new weird FB application called the Seance Purging Exorcist? Christ, someone's going to read this blog and actually design that, ain't they?

The point is: personal data is gathered and applications never seem to go away - is FB a massive conspiracy? It's got the biggest uptake than any of the rival social networking websites - bloody heck, even my mother is thinking of setting up an FB profile, which is always a good indicator of the popularity of a technological phenomenon. The most technically illiterate are buying into this - my Mum is quite happy to admit having a relationship with technology in the same way that I have a relationship with Angelina Jolie; it's non-existent and never likely to go further than that pot of gold I saw bobbing around at the end of the rainbow the other day.

Finally, things are never a good sign in the surveillance society when Microsoft decides to buy an enormous stake in it. Microsoft now part-owns FB. Think about that - Bill Gates now owns part of you. If that isn't enough for you to run away from your computer and go and live in a kibbutz somewhere, then I pity you. Anyway, enough prattling - I'm away to see if my new FB Hotness application is revealing online totty that fancy my FB face.