This week in Facebook land, 5,700 people were unfriended, another 409,000 got hacked when they clicked on something that promised to tell them who was stalking them. A Facebook Land spokesperson reiterated that the Curious Stalker Infection had gone viral and that there was little or nothing they could do about it. In another corner of Facebook Land this week, people were getting seriously annoyed with unknown Facebook gremlins who snuck into people’s account settings and changed them, clogging inboxes all over Cyberspace, with emails telling you that some fool had tagged them in a photo and 55000 people had made a fatuous comment on it.
Otherwise it was a normal week, revolutions were organised, flash mobs congratulated and protests were the order of the day. I went from one protest page to a poll in a newspaper website; recording my vote on the issue de jour, I was shocked to see that the opinions shared by me and my Facebook Posse was a minority voice of the nation. Just when I thought I was mainstream!
Remember when a hack was a horse? Remember when you dropped friends or just ‘lost touch’ with them deliberately? Remember when doctors gave you a medicine for a virus? Remember when tagging was something done in a clothing factory? For those whose memory doesn’t reach so far back into the annals of recent history, remember when the television was our trusted source of information? Or when Google was the modern day bus ticket to the Information Superhighway? Life is changing so rapidly that even the Information Superhighway has more flyovers than a Libyan village and even Google searches are passé.
Celebrities are twittering their deepest darkest denials and denouements all over the twitter zone while magazines and newspapers struggle to keep up with the blistering pace of information burning up and down copper wires all over Mother Earth. And tweet they must if they want to stay in the public eye, an eye which is turning ever more inward.
Now everyone is entitled to 15 minutes of Facebook fame. But if it’s real fame you are after then your forum is YouTube where you can post videos of your homegrown celebrity and wait for yourself to go viral. If it’s infamy that you seek then try an online dating page or fantasy game sites. You can try Alter Egos for size online, limited only by your imagination and your search engine.
See that little thumbs up down there at the bottom of the page? Hit it and ‘like’ me. Hit it even if you don’t like me and then add the comment “I don’t like this” to your ‘like’. Keep that little cyber ball in the air baby, as Oscar Wilde once said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is NOT being talked about.” Oscar who? You may well ask. Facebook him and join any of his 450,000 fans or go to the Frases de Oscar Wilde Page and get the drop on him there.
