I hate social networking sites

Over the course of my tenure as a writer for E14, I have found myself trying hard to explain how sporadic my posts have been since the site's inception. This is not simply an article about procrastination, there'll be time for that later. Instead, I am going to use this avenue to vent for a short while.

Today, my day consisted of waking up at 12:00pm, thanks to a recurring sleep problem I have recently re-discovered. I then proceeded to play Viva Pinata on Xbox 360 for 2 hours, before heading over to Bluewater for a bit of window shopping and caught the movie Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I have to say, I concur immensely with Brad's review. After that, I returned home. Since that time, I have been on Facebook. Which do you think is the genuine waste of time? A deeply involving micro-management game that happens to involve pinatas? Or a social networking site that has actually convinced me to become less sociable?

It started innocently enough, I went on and took my turn on all the Scrabble games I'm currently playing with people from work and friends from school. It then went to the point where I have now been at the PC for a good three hours, and have only this article ultimately to show for it (and that's assuming I can get to finishing this!)

Why is it we lend so much credence to these websites? I have, at last count, 315 friends on Facebook and 113 on Myspace. Most of those are interchangeable, as most of my Myspace friends are also on Facebook, but that's a total of around 350 people I should supposedly revere as if they were gods among men. Instead, how many of them do I actually speak to? Probably less than 50. How many of them do I like? Probably about the same.

Now I'm reading all about these things called Twitter. Some sort of live blog so people can keep up with your life minute to minute? Let me tell you something. It's not going to be a popular point of view, but it's the truth. Unless you fall into a very minor percentage of celebrities or people doing exciting and important things with their lives, nobody cares.

Nobody cares about your job worries. Either you hate your job, or you don't have one. If you don't have one, don't blame social networking sites for your lack of productivity. It's your own stupid fault for being so lazy and unwilling to work for what you want. That's a whole different kettle of fish which I may touch on another day, but my point is that Bruce Campbell didn't become a cult icon by spending all day blogging on Twitter about his dinner or jobseeking habits. He did it by working hard and being awesome.



And another thing, stop sending me fucking applications. I am a fan of many things: movies, TV shows, games, characters etc. I don't need to join your stupid group in order to express that. And as far as the chat function goes, an integrated browser chat that works sporadically and pops up when I'm typing something important ranks on the list of things I want somewhere between a punch to the kidneys and M.E.

Also, if I'm unwilling to enter into a substantial financial investment using a major bank or recognised financial institution, I certainly will not enter into one from a link on a Facebook application, so that I can earn fake money for the application to tell me which of my friends thinks I could be a gangster.

I've decided that for every minute I waste on Facebook, I plan to spend two minutes on my Xbox 360 playing Fallout 3. For every bullshit application I get offered to join up to, I will expose my character to radiation for 5 seconds. I anticipate that eventually, the radiation present in the game Fallout 3 will actually begin to seep THROUGH the disc into my console, where it will travel to my controller in order to increase my radiation level sufficiently that this is how I will look after one week of social networking sites:

Thanks a fucking bunch, Facebook.