In Continuum.

Virtual Muffins

A little over four years ago, my sister came into my room and proposed to me an idea. She gave me the link to a website and asked me to check it out, and the concept of the website confused me immensely. It was a website called Friendster, a clever wordplay but a concept that felt unnecessary and forgettable. She was eager for me the join the website, create an account, and start looking for long lost friends from my grade school and high school. I am sure everybody knows what Friendster is, because it is probably the most commonly owned possession - in a way - just second to a cellphone these days. Everybody has an account, and though the popularity has been taken over by websites with similar functions, Friendster still remains as the pioneer of this concept of creating a six degrees of separation between the people of the world. For those ignorant readers out there who knows not of what Friendster is, here is a little run down.

Friendster works pretty much like Myspace or Facebook, bringing a bunch of people you know and don't know together, and they place your names and pictures on a giant map of social network. Soon enough, it wouldn't take an idiot to see that two of your friends, whom you have met in different stages of your life, might have known each other for the longest time. You begin by creating an account of yourself, a profile with your photograph about where you are schooling, where you schooled, what you are working as, your favorite music and movies, all that jazz. It feels like a little job interview initially, but the fun begins when you begin to add friends to your growing list of contacts, and they even get to add testimonials to your profile. If a person has something nice to say about you, they come to your profile and add a little comment about you, and people who might not know you might want to add you to their list because they find you intriguing. OK, that is highly unlikely in today's context, since testimonials are mainly there to make yourself feel better on darker days of the month. Other than that, Friendster provides a very solid function of searching out old friends on the net, people whom you have lost contact with over the years, for one reason or another.

I basically regurgitated what my sister told me that October night four years ago, translated into English and with a better grammar. I wasn't sure of what to think of the website, because the idea of finding my old high school friends was not exactly very appealing, considering the fact that they were the exact same bunch of people I wanted to avoid in the first place. You see, time has no eyes to see, and it sweeps away not only good friends in the course of life, but also the ones you despised with a raging passion. I have had people whom I hated for various reasons, adding me to their lists just because we were related one way or another in school. But then again, it is not very nice to reject people like that. After all, you HAVE had interactions with that person, and rejecting that person's invitation would be seen as a form of immaturity, since it implies that you cannot dust yourself off and move on from the past. Here is when the concept of Friendster gets distorted, and incredibly tricky.

People started using Friendster for a variety of reasons. The website was created out of goodwill, in the sense that the creators merely wanted a channel in which friends can relate to the old and the new ones. However, the number of friends you are related to became a war over the internet somehow, people comparing the number of friends they have and then boasting about how popular they are in their social circle. Apparently, those numbers next to their profile has the mystical power of making them feel better about themselves. They can be satisfied with their lives just because they have about five hundred friends, and about a thousand testimonials to boot. The truth is, they've probably never talked to or met about three quarter of those people added to their lists. They get a kick out of saying," How many friends have you got?" when they see somebody else with just a little more than twenty friends on their lists. I have such people on my list, creating multiple accounts because they were no longer able to fit in the size of their social circle, which is only possible to attain if you visit a mass orgy sex party every single night that involves fifty people or more. Or, maybe they have. Who knows.

Testimonials became a battle ground for boasting as well. Testimonials used to be a place whereby friends give honest opinions about yourself - or, at least they are supposed to be honest. Anyway, the battle ground where people used to post honest comments about yourself, turned into a damn chat room of sorts. People started giving useless one word comments as your testimonials, and sometimes they don't even have a word at all. A "=)" can replace a testimonial these days, and it's not like anybody is complaining because it helps to boost their testimonial count as well. This in turn makes them feel better about themselves, because testimonials are supposed to be positive things about you, and the more you have of those, the better you should feel.

I began to have strange contacts adding me from all over the world. A random girl from Canada added me because we are both Taiwanese. A stranger from a random high school added me to he sixth account because I am somehow related to her through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. I am also related to a middle-aged mother from the Philippines because we both love John Mayer and Damien Rice. People have been abusing the website ever since it was created, and we all just have to play along with the rules. As we have learned in COM101, Computer Mediated Communication - or CMC - has changed the way humans communicate with one another. Which means that it is possible for two person to be called 'friends', even if they have never met each other before, whatsoever.

It is a little sad, if you think about it. In the past, making friends was for the mere purpose of making friends. You guys are joined in the same work place, the same class, the same school, and you guys socialize because that is what humans do with one another, we are each others' company. Like elephants, chimpanzees or water buffalo, we tend to live in groups and none of us can survive in solitary for long. Even Tom Hanks had a volleyball as company on a deserted island, so why not ordinary humans? Making friends used to be a join, because you get to discover what another human being likes and dislikes, what he or she has in common with you or otherwise. It is nice to belong to any social group, and that is why humans make friends - because we have the insatiable desire to connect with one another. That has changed with the ability to quantify friends on the internet.

You see, with the numbers tagged with your profile on the website, people start to make friends not for the sake of making friends, but rather to boost those senseless numbers to a god-like level. I'm sure only God - of any religion - knows so many people in reality, unless those people with ridiculous amount of friends are trying to play God. People are now making friends to show off to others how popular they are, how well-liked they are in their community because they have that many friends to lean on in life. It becomes a little disturbing at times, to imagine a person making friends with you and being all nice and interesting, only because he wants to boost his friends count online. I am sure this kind of people do exist, and I have met people like this in my life. Acquaintance can't even be used as a word to describe us, since we hardly even greet each other on the corridors. But I guess, in the politics of socialization, you just have to keep these comments to yourself. It's not like anybody is going to reject a Friendster invitation and tell that person "I'm not your friend, why did you add me for jackass?"

Friendster's popularity gave way to other similar websites. Amongst those, Myspace and Facebook are probably the more prominent and successful of them all. Myspace works pretty much like Friendster, only it has much more users because it is based in the States. Bands and singers have their own private accounts there too, and they are using Myspace as a tool to promote their albums, their tour dates, or even their personal lives if they wish. However, the problems with Friendster spread on to Myspace, and people are again using it for all the wrong reasons. People start to look down on you if you have lesser friends than them, and they address you as being the loner only because you don't have a three digit number in your friends count box. It is a constant war that wages between the users that cannot be stopped, which must have been why the idiotic Facebook was created in the first place.

In Facebook, it is possible to do whatever you want to another users - everything that ranges from calling him nasty nicknames, or throwing a chocolate pie in his face. Of course, everything in Facebook happens virtually, and none of those actually happens in reality. Which is exactly the irony and idiocy that is involved in the users of Facebook, because they are constantly involved in senseless fighting such as the ones mentioned above, to no avail. I was being introduced to Facebook by a certain schoolmate of mine several weeks ago, and he spoke of the website as if it was a product he was trying to sell to save his life. Like Friendster, I created an account on Facebook in less than five minutes, and tried my hands on the website to see if it is indeed true that the website is "FUN!", in bold and highlighted. Well, lets just say, I gave up in fifteen minutes.

The fact that the user interface can only be understood by an alien from outer space with four brains is frustrating enough. Facebook has a million different functions to screw with the brain of the users. Facebook also provides useless functions which, makes little to no sense to me at all. I have been given nicknames, dared to speak in a fake British accent in school for a whole week, given a "Super Poke", and a cow has been thrown at me as well. The first thing you are going to notice in Facebook is the fact that people are doing online trading of muffins, cupcakes, punches, pokes, and other ridiculous things for no apparent reasons. If there is a place on the internet where you can shout "WHAT THE HELL?" with the most justification, it would be a common account in Facebook. I don't get what the hell they are trying to do, and have no intentions on finding out as well. The idiocy eludes me, and the e-mails that flood into my mailbox everyday from Facebook is pissing me off as well.

So, what do I think about networking on the internet? Not much. It no longer makes much of a sense, especially when people are throwing virtual cars and cows at each other for no reason at all. This is one internet trend that I am probably not going to stick with, that's for sure. If people are going to argue in the future as to how internet has made us dumb and stupid, I suggest that they begin from the angle of how people are now throwing cows at each other on the internet. Yeah, I know. The concept is warped, but people are doing that as we speak, and calling it 'fun' at the same time. Now, back to studying for the quiz tomorrow. It's not enjoyable, but at least it'd make more sense than munching on virtual muffins.