I have no ‘friends’, no ´social network' (!)

I know a few individuals I'd call friends. I just don’t have ‘friends’ in the FaceSpace sense of the word.

Cyber-corporations claim they know who my friends are. Bollocks. I have none of their ‘friends’ because the reality behind having ‘friends’ in ‘social networking’ is for me and those ‘friends’ to provide, free of charge, the vultures of coporate sales departments with yet another personally tailored and neatly defined target group. A good deal for the capitalists making money out of us but not much good for me or my (real) friends.

No service is ever free: you always have to pay some way or other. I prefer to pay up front for the service I need ().

I'm sick to the teeth of consumerism's propaganda pedlars persuading me to part with my money for the benefit of the company they're working for. They say the product or service is on OFFER [not SALE], that I will SAVE [not SPEND], that I will WIN [not LOSE], that there's CASH BACK [money coming IN, not going OUT], that I’m getting something (that I probably neither want nor need) FOR FREE, that prices have been SLASHED to AS LITTLE AS '99' instead of '100', etc. They seem to take me for an idiot. I resent that.

I don’t want anyone who uses this site to be exposed, directly or indirectly, to the boring and infantile machinations of ‘advertising’. That’s why I prefer to pay for this site out of my own pocket and why I don’t engage in ‘social networking’ on line. If you want to tell me what you’re doing or to find out what I’m doing, contact me as a human being. If you’re a friend you´ll already have my phone numbers and email address anyhow!

I apologise for the consumerist propaganda you’ll find plastered on my YouTube videos. When I started uploading stuff to YouTube there was no such invasion by the persistent pedlars of stuff no-one asked to know about. I’ve written to Google/YouTube asking if I can pay to remove the blight of ´advertising’ from my productions. No reply so far (December 2011). I’m looking for a marketing-free way of putting my videos on line. If you have any suggestions, please contact me.

Public and private spheres (´pointless babble´)

In 2009 I Googled |+facebook +"I had for breakfast"|: about 1,200,000 hits. The equivalent result for MySpace was 600,000. Here are some other search results documenting the riveting content of social networking sites:

•   Hits     : |Search string|
  ----------------------------
  
•      14,500: |+facebook +"Bob is an idiot"|
•  >½ million: |+MySpace +"I like sex"|
•  >½ million: |+facebook +"my favourite" OR "my favorite"|
• >2¼ million: |+facebook +"I go to sleep"
•  >4 million: |+facebook +"my boy friend"|
• >4½ million: |+facebook +"my girl friend"|
•  >7 million: |+myspace +"I hate"|
• >22 million: |+myspace +"I really like"|

A helluva lot of personal details and opinion, here, most of them belonging clearly to the private, sometimes even intimate, sphere. This vast amount of private personalia is strewn all over the internet, just like all those concealed yet emphasised private parts plastered on billboards all over the cityscape (Dolce & Gabbana’s prominently placed erotic fantasies of supposedly desirable young adults in various states of undress are obvious examples). Plastering private parts of people’s lives all over the public sphere is something advertisers seem bent on doing. I don’t see why we should have to be exposed to it, even less why we ourselves would want to put the private parts of our own lives on public display.

Like most people, I don’t want to know what someone I´ve never heard of had for breakfast, or what they think of Bob. I don’t need to know if they’re worried about their partner flirting, or whether they hate Céline Dion (unless if I’m an anthropologist studying Dion fandom), any more than I want to see strange young men posing homo-erotically in underpants as I enter the train station. The internet is, like it or not, a public space allowing comparatively democratic access to anyone wanting to contribute to or take part in the global public forum it provides.

That’s why, even on my personal page, I’ve taken out all the private parts of my life that I don’t think belong in the public sphere. In the same way that I do not intend to walk naked downtown or in any other public place, I think that my phone numbers, email address, postal address, date of birth, all my personal preferences, likes and dislikes, my financial and marital status, details about my health and domestic life, etc. are, with certain obvious exceptions, nobody’s business except mine. None of it need be on public display. I don’t hide my political opinion (see Rants) because politics is in my view such a clearly public issue.

Penultimate thought

I think it’s sad and ironic that so many individuals using online ‘social networking’ seem to believe that the things of least interest to a general public are those they should publicise. It’s a crazy upside-down world in which the overriding mode of public presentation of human beings is one of decontextualised and desocialised individual subjectivities. The opportunity of online networking to organise and to make the world a better place seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the sphere of My Chit-Chat, Twit-Twat, Space-Face, Friend-Trend, Blither-Blather. Thank goodness this old man's glum view does not apply to thousands of other blogs and sites out there in cyberspace.

How many people really care about what I ‘like’? Not many, apart from capitalists targetting my tastes and foibles so they can sell me stuff I don’t want to know about. I often let my friends (not ‘friends’) know what I like or dislike and I get to know their preferences too. I don’t see why we should let marketing departments hijack relationships of shared values between friends. Or don’t you care about your friends?

Why I don’t tweety-pie

“Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset if the company changes hands”... “[A]dvertisers can target users based on their history of tweets and may quote tweets in ads directed specifically to the user”. (Source: Wikipedia entry referring to Twitter Privacy Policy, ‘Advertisers watch your every Tweet’, and ‘Twitter Vulnerability´). I don’t want to encourage or subscribe to any of that. Do you?

Philip Tagg
(Huddersfield, 2010-07-30, upd. 2010-09-09, 2010-12-12, 2011-12-09, 2011-12-15)