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.