Web two point oh Christ almighty

Wanted: Social Affairs Man­ager to take day-to-day respons­ib­il­ity for main­ten­ance and upkeep of my Face­book, Twit­ter, Last.fm and Flickr accounts, ensur­ing that all are reg­u­larly updated with fre­quent and, above all, scin­til­lat­ing new con­tent to make the sub­ject appear greater than the sum of his rather unin­spir­ing parts. Exper­i­ence desir­able. Salary nego­ti­able. Bene­fits neg­li­gible. Apply within.

Because there are times when I simply can’t find enough ways to make my syn­apses sizzle and my brain inflame, I have recently caught myself won­der­ing how someone who is such a self-confessed bundle of social neur­oses, status anxi­et­ies, inferi­or­ity com­plexes and com­mu­nic­at­ory tics can sud­denly find him­self involved in quite so many online social net­works — each of them nat­ur­ally even more point­less than the last to have burned brightly but briefly as the must-have fad, and each of them engaged in a fren­zied battle of petu­lant scream­ing and foot-stamping as they demand to be heard above the unend­ing elec­tronic babble of zer­oes and ones:

“No! Look at my list of friends! I’m so pop­u­lar, me!“
“No! Look at what I’m doing! My life is much more fas­cin­at­ing than yours!“
“No! Look at the obscure music I’m listen­ing to! I’m so fash­ion­able!“
“No! Look at my beau­ti­ful pho­tos and the responses they’ve received!”

Oh, and of course, not for­get­ting the phrase that kick-started this entire despic­able trend:

“Hello. I write a weblog.”

Per­haps for­tu­nately, just as such piti­ful bouts of navel-gazing have felt on the verge of slip­ping into self-abuse (though not of the pleas­ur­able vari­ety, I might add), I have man­aged to grip to the crum­bling edge of the pre­cip­ice and save myself from the black abyss by remem­ber­ing a sali­ent fact.

It’s not real. None of it is real.

It’s all make-believe and high gloss image cre­ation. I’ll list you as being amongst my best friends because I think it makes me look good (even though I’ve never met you and wouldn’t recog­nise you if you were pushed up against me in a sardine-packed com­muter car­riage). I’ll drop in a few tan­tal­ising tit­bits of my daily hap­pen­ings to make myself look busy, busy, busy and utterly fas­cin­at­ing (even though the most fas­cin­at­ing thing I have done today has been to slowly eat a rather dry and unap­pet­ising chicken sand­wich). I’ll show you all that i don’t listen to a single note of music that hasn’t been pre-approved by the uber-cool music police (even though I turn off the noti­fic­a­tions that might give the game away when I’m listen­ing to Take That on repeat play). I’ll let you see my moody por­trait shots and artistic exper­i­ments with long expos­ures (even though my memory card prob­ably con­tains noth­ing more than two hun­dred pho­tos of my auntie’s fat tabby cat lying in vari­ous com­ical poses).

Mean­while, the harsh truth remains that if I was actu­ally put into a room with six, six­teen or twenty-six people, I would still be that sweat­ing, stam­mer­ing, stum­bling and clammy-palmed nervous wreck I have always been, unable to look even my closest friends in the eyes.

Be sure to remem­ber, there­fore, that in the world of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, my life is dan­ger­ous, excit­ing and cap­tiv­at­ing. In the world of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, I am a flut­ter­ing social but­ter­fly whose every pro­found utter­ance holds his numer­ous friends, acquaint­ances and hangers-on com­pletely spell­bound. In the world of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, everything — but everything — is fas­cin­at­ing bey­ond your rather lim­ited earth­bound com­pre­hen­sion. In the world of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, I am simply far more inter­est­ing than you.

In the mean­time, how­ever, I’m hav­ing a quiet night in. My pants and jeans are cur­rently com­men­cing the spin cycle, and I really ought to wash up that burnt sauce­pan I used earlier to make my din­ner. In any spare moments that I have left over from indul­ging in such reck­less thrills and spiils and gen­er­ally liv­ing life on the edge, I will spend some time reas­sur­ing myself that, yes, I am a com­plete hypo­crite by check­ing to see if there are any new posts on the Face­book group for passive-aggressive blog­gers that I cre­ated — highly iron­ic­ally and, of course, in a fit of bit­ter and twis­ted passive-aggression — some days ago. It’s quite the most exclus­ive place to be seen, you know.

Though of course, that’s all far too dull, bor­ing and yawn­ingly pro­saic to tell you. I won’t be blog­ging any of it.

Oh. Damn.