Social-Networking is the new black, it seems. Everyone's on there somewhere, Myface, Bebook, Twitface - the world is online, merrily conversing with one another, uploading their drunken photos, twittering their ...whatever it is you twitter.
I'm a victim too, I'll admit it. I use the thing for swapping my drunken photos, organising gigs, and keeping in touch with people I haven't seen for years and was more than happy to never see again until facebook came along. One thing troubles me though, and that's those self righteous 'facebook campaigners' who bombard you with requests to join groups, with the aim of petitioning this, that, or the other. It now seems that if something in the world bothers you, you don't march on London with a placard, or write a strongly worded letter to The Times or to your local MP. What you do is start a facebook group. Because everyone knows the real social injustices in the world can be ironed out by a poorly conceived petition with an ill-informed mission statement written in something that could almost pass for English if you added the punctuation and all the vowels back in, and truncated the smattering of smiley faces and words spelled phonetically from numbers.
Here follows a few brief examples of groups I've recently had requests to join, together with a few choice words of my own on the subject:
"Oooh no! they've changed facebook, I don't like it! Mummy, make it stop! I'm gonna start a group petitioning against it and they'll bring the old one back if enough people join!"
Right... how about this; if you don't like facebook, stop bloody using it. It's free. It's not compulsory. If they suddenly painted the inside of your local supermarket a slightly different colour would you climb up onto your high horse and get a petition going to change it back because you liked Magnolia better than Arctic White and you couldn't find your favourite brand of baked beans against a slightly different coloured background? No you wouldn't, so shut up.
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"I say, what's happening in Zimbabwe is an outrage! If we all get together and form a Facebook group, maybe Robert Mugabe will change his mind and stop persecuting his people and decimating his country"
Of course he would. Because Mugabe is going to really lose sleep over the fact that a bunch of middle-class wannabe do-gooders have got together and signed their names on an obscure campaign list lurking somewhere in a sprawling social-networking site, deep within the bowels of the internet. A list that is directed specifically at... no-one, other than those individuals that make up its numbers, as a method of asserting their self-righteousness. Oh and I'm sure the fact that said middle-class 'campaigners' come from the former colonial power that stole his country in the first place and raped it of its mineral resources before finally being persuaded to give it back is going to throw some extra weight behind the argument.
If you want to make a difference, give to charity, lobby your MP, write to those in power, use your power as a consumer of global goods to lodge your opinion. Don't join a bloody pointless facebook group.
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"Paying for a TV license in this country is obscene - it's £120 a year just to watch telly! I'm putting a stop to this right now with this facebook group!"
Okay. Have you seen any foreign TV recently? Any American channels where the program you're trying to watch is played in brief breaks between the endless, shitty adverts? Any dodgy, low budget European channels full of garish colour and the cheapest presenters scraped up from the nearest dole queue to some obscure stage school? Have you seen ITV for god's sake? Or the plethora of rubbish digital channels available on freeview where you spend an afternoon flipping through what's on offer and find nothing even remotely interesting to watch? Every so often on said digital channels you'll come across a hidden gem. And chances are its been made by the BBC, and bought in to give said channel just a little bit of gravitas in its otherwise dreary representation of what they think the British Television Viewing Public want to see. The BBC is an organisation to make the world envious. Its output is professional, (mostly) superbly high quality, and is not littered with adverts every 10 minutes. They have at least 8 TV channels delivering this content, which you pay for with your 120 quid. On top of this they broadcast at least 7 national radio stations and countless local stations absolutely free. They are also custodians of what I believe is one of the most comprehensive and informative sites on the internet, which even gives you the ability to re-watch or listen again to pretty much all of their broadcast TV and radio content for a week.
A tenner a month for all that? If you ask me that's pretty bloody cheap. Stop whinging.
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"I want to eat shit even more conveniently, so I want McDonalds to deliver to my door. If we get enough people to join this group they will"
McDonalds have no interest in you apart from turning your finances into their own fat profits by the cunning method of repackaging chemically-infested arse-ends of the commercial factory farmed food industry into garishly coloured cartons and flogging it to little kids by bribing them with cheap plastic toys. If you really want to eat this homogeneous, tasteless, nutritionless rubbish, the least you can do is get off your arse and burn a few calories going to get it. To be honest, I very much doubt it'll improve the flavour much having half an hour of transit time added into the recipe, even if McDonalds would instigate such a service based upon a few people who've signed up to a measly facebook group. Which they won't.
It used to be a practical joke to leave a paper bag full of shit on someone's doorstep. Now it seems people are willing to pay for the privilege.
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"RIP Jade Goody, your untimely passing has left a gaping-unrepairable hole in my life, and I just had to start this facebook group to cope with it"
At risk of sounding cruel and heartless, what is going on here? Yes, it's very sad that a young woman has been struck down by a hideous degenerative disease, and has, in the prime of her life, lost the battle and left her husband and two kids to fend for themselves in the world. But can we please have some perspective? According to Cancer Research, 2,800 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in Britain every year. Wikipedia, unfortunately had no figures for Britain, but gives an estimate that in America in 2008, 3,870 women were killed as a result of the disease. Where are their tributes? I'll be willing to bet that the vast majority of their kids don't have four and a half million in the bank to help them get started in life. Although little Bobby and Freddie may have to periodically part with chunks of cash in order to keep paying their Dad's bail every time he beats someone up, it's still a pretty good start.
Jade Goody, was famous for the sake of being famous. She made her millions by selling her soul to cheap television and women's glossy weeklies. Perhaps you feel some kind of collective responsibility for her because you bought the mags, watched the crap TV programmes, and by robbing her of every scrap of her private life, propelled her from being a lowly, semi-literate dental nurse into being a semi-literate z-list celebrity millionaire. Oh yes, you've also conveniently forgotten that only a year ago you hated her with every sinew in your hypocritical body for acting like an ignorant racist cow on national television. Or rather, you hated her because the aforementioned tabloid media told you to, because just as they made a shedload of cash from propelling her to stardom, they were more than willing to make another shedload from dragging her down again, albeit as a result of her own, ignorant comments.
It's a sad case of affairs that the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed so-called culture we perpetrate in this country should now stoop to the level that Jade's last public act was to sell her death-story to OK! magazine, in order for them to publish a macabre pre-death obituary and make another shedload of money from her passing.
Today, in Iraq, 25 innocent people attending a funeral and mourning the loss of a loved one were killed by a suicide bomber. An agonising death, women, children, ripped apart by red hot shrapnel. Countless more were injured. Do they have a facebook group to mourn their loss? No, because frankly, no-one's making a fat pile of cash out of their lives. Nobody can sell thousands of crappy womens' glossy weeklies by cashing in on the gory details of their untimely death.
If you want to mourn Jade, go and buy OK! magazine, read her inflated story, give a little bit of cash to her kids and her jailbird husband to add to their millions. And by doing so, give more cash to her fat-cat publicist, Max Clifford, and the media barons of the cut-throat tabloid press who propelled her to fame in the first instance. A life lost. They don't care, it boosts the circulation figures.
If you want to pay a real tribute, give your money to Cancer Research instead. They'll actually put it towards preventing many, many more women suffering silently at the hands of cancer. But you don't need a facebook group to do that, you just need some common sense and a sense of perspective.
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Seeing as how this is a subject I evidently feel passionately about, I felt the need to create my own facebook group to further my cause, albeit with a certain sense of irony. It's simply called Stop asking me to join pointless bloody facebook groups and you can join simply by clicking on the link.
