Today’s article is a guest post from Ian at wreckered.co.uk. Enjoy.

Are you sharing the moments in your life? Are you uploading? Are you Tweeting, Buzzing, Digging? Are you doing it on the move? Are you finding old and new friends online? Have you backed-up your data? Have you backed-up your friends? Have you noticed any real difference in anything, at all? Are you buying into any of this garbage?

Don’t get me wrong: the internet is a fantastic resource. I know. I’ve read it twice. But the white heat of this technology has become stained by hype and cooled by habit and made ridiculous by its users. Those users, at least, who will Google instead of recall; who hint that that I wouldn’t have missed the party if I’d checked online, that the party is actually happening online, that I should blog, tweet, chat, upgrade, upload and regularly update my profile. Well, my life may not be bliss, but it is at least free from the viral anxieties which come pre-installed in that operating system.

Fashion and television, of course, have long benefitted from the implication that if you are not taking part, you are missing out. Or worse, that there is something not right about you. The difference is in the extent to which the web world uses that psychology to unsettle us, to get to us. In all it’s specious appeals, security is the subtext and insecurity the guard who got bribed.

So, self-worth gets skewed, curiosity piqued and tweaked by a combination of hardware, software and the relentless sound of advertisers (as Orwell said) “rattling a stick in a swill bucket.” (Now, there’s an ironic ringtone).

Ever since computers settled in our homes, when something clearly brittle and square was described to us as a floppy disk, there has been distortion of language and meaning. A social network, for instance: there is clearly nothing social about sitting at a computer – or uploading from a phone while having dinner with friends. Photos are no longer photos – they are “precious memories”, to be saved and stored on flash drives, hard drives, disks and digital vaults. I never used to have data. Now it seems I have gigabytes of the stuff. And, apparently, it is vulnerable. Cue the anxiety.

Thank God, then, for storage devices, firewalls and social networks. We can sleep easier knowing that our files are not only backed-up, but they can be shared among family and colleagues. Social networkers can bin their anti-anxiety pills: after all, who needs medication when they have so many friends? Who needs reassurance when software announces your birthday and best wishes arrive via text?

Now, millions of words have been written about Facebook and it’s creepy cousins, but here’s a handful more, to set things straight, then let’s be done with it. A Facebook page is a roomful of morons gazing at each others’ navels. Regularly, someone adds fluff. (Alison Likes This).

Okay. Next. Twitter is laughable. A tweet is a text message sent to no-one in particular. It may be a new way of communicating, but what it communicates, what it says, is something that will be studied by future generations. They will find evidence of our half-wit narcissism. Such evidence will be stored in The Cloud. Password-protected for posterity. (Pat Likes This).

My girlfriend’s son is impressed by storage. That is, impressed by the notion of space contained within a box. The more stuff you can put in the box (Wow! 500gb!), the better. The contents of the box are less interesting than the quantity. A strange perspective, but then, he also thinks that sharper pictures on a larger screen make television programmes better (a view shared by millions of grown-up consumers). He and they are deluded: drivel remains drivel whether it is Blu Ray, Plasma or 3D drivel.

The medium (or “delivery platform”) has become more important than what is being delivered. But, from the sub-prime vanities of farcebook to the fetishism of mobile phones, the messages are still both clear and mendacious: conformity is security, bliss is ignorance, you are unique.

This just in from an RSS Feed: the emperor will get naked in a moment, but right now he is checking his e-mail. (Bruce Likes This).

 Loading ...