Wow, your satirical and sarcastic humour is completely revolutionary and has nEVeR been seen on the internet before!!!111!1!one1!!! (that was so meta of me)

I’ve been really thinking about getting a Twitter. I have a sharp wit, grandiose social networking skills and a yearning thirst for pop culture. So am I twitter material?

It’s funny enough that it’s a big decision whether or not I can twitter. I think the main thing stopping myself is the constant fear of rejection… What if nobody follows me??! What if nobody re-tweets me (whatever that is)?? What if I can’t find my tweeteriffic voice and get lost in the bunch of half-assed pop culture references? The funny thing about social networking is that it thrives on an economy of acceptance and affirmation. The whole concept of ‘liking’ something has emerged from a casual thumbs up to what somebody’s doing online (hey, that’s pretty cool!) to a IF I DONT GET THIS MANY LIKES THEN NOBODY LOVES ME AND IM GOING TO FAIL AT EVERYTHING I EVER ATTEMPT FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE 

Which is pretty terrifying. We’ve kind of emerged into creatures that thrive on acceptance (in the form of a button click from your peers); I know I have in some ways. I love when a joke I’ve made gets a lot of likes, it’s definitely confirmation that I’m pretty funny. Or a picture with heaps of likes will make me feel pretty. This is pretty sad, but it’s the way things are these days. There are Facebook famous people who have 300+ likes on their profile pictures, and they’re the envy of so many girls who feel not quite as attractive or accepted as them. But are these people really happy? I know a girl who has a few hundred likes on a particularly revealing profile picture and she’s shown me some of the perverted disgusting messages some random people have sent her and claims it’s not that big a deal that she’s got that many likes. We’ve reverted to being media whores who need to sexualise, publicise or promote ourselves in order to fit in.

So, should I get twitter? Or is that what society wants me to do…………….?

This is so funny. And relevant. And pop culture. And media. And only 14 seconds long. Love it, Adrian/Media Factory Blog you MuSt watch it, I had a good ol’ laugh out loud.

Adrian pingbacked me (is that the past tense of pingback??) and really helped me understand the notion of the ‘virtuality’ of the Network. I originally was confused because I thought Adrian meant the network was definitely not virtual, but I thought it was. This post made it clear to me that it’s mainly non-virtual although virtuality is an important concept to the network as it’s not technically ‘real!’

Thanks Adrian!

The Faces Of Facebook app/website thingo. THIS IS BIZARRE. As the Network Media blog wrote on this post , this is the result of the plethora of networks and loose connections that are omitted into the internet.

There’s nothing more humbling and frightening then seeing how many billions of other people have complete online words and identities, use their laptops for hours on end and have a complete social and personal environment in the network. Not just I am doing this, not just everyone in this room, or this university, or this city… but the 1 and half BILLION people on facebook are doing this. It really makes me think about what Adrian said the other day about the carbon footprint on the internet. The network is so vast and unimaginably large. It’s full of loose ties and connections running left and right and up and down all over the virtual environment.

I can’t find myself. That’s upsetting. I’m such an insignificant dot on the Facebook population….

I think this is pretty cute. It’s so easy to call things like the floppy disk and VHS tape “retro” but what was “retro” back then? And when those things, such as film reels and desktop computers were brand new, what was retro then? And so on and so forth until we get to the gramophone…. and the wheel. How retro is the wheel?!