I am not in a good mood. With this in mind, sitting at my computer is probably not the best thing to be doing, what with it being crap and all. There are also the reasons behind this griping, most of which are down to my own canon of deficiencies as a man. One small and non-contentious example is how just now as I was driving into my street, someone else came the other way in one of those big, silver fuck-you type Mercedes coupés. and we were both blocked. My reaction wasn't to give way gracefully or even wait a second or two for him to move, but to pull a sarcastic face at the other car. And scowl. I know this because when I did reverse, the guy stopped next to me, opened his window and said “I'd have moved, but you pulled a face at me, so I stayed put. Think about it”, and he was exactly right. Sorry, man in the Mercedes. It was more instinct than anything, and I didn't realise I'd done it, didn't really mean it and like I said, I am in a bad mood.
One of the other, non-my own stupid self drivers of my ill-cheer is Facebook. Not because it's in itself rubbish or anything like that. No, it's fine. The crisp blues and sans serif fonts work just as well as they have ever done. It's a whole house's worth of better than MySpace ever was, a site designed by the naïve for the brainless to make unusable for the normal. HTML is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, and when nine-tenths of those hands are under 16, man are those some dangerous hands. Who among us has not at some point been stuck on an MS page as it loads 231 photographs of Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro and a sparkly background in hot pink, unable to move until its finished because for some reason the Stop button doesn't work? Yes, it's everyone. It was that (plus an even crapper computer than I have now) which drove me to Facebook in the first place.
So, nice interface aside, what is it about FB (as it's known to no-one apart from me) that is so riling me? Well, for a start, it's trouble. See, at work one of my jobs is to monitor the internet use logs. When I am not replacing spent print cartridges, fixing network points or repeatedly installing the printer in room 38A (six times so far and counting), I am watching the kids surf the net, basically. And our policy at the school is fairly liberal, certainly compared to many. We have Firefox for the IT nerds to play with, Notepad++ for the same nerds to write viruses for their A2 coursework on and finally MySpace, Bebo and Facebook etc for the media gang to integrate into their lessons on the digital age.
This is the theory. The only real flaw in that setup is 1500 teenagers. They are ingenious, inexhaustibly distracted and devious as snakes. Also their spelling is atrocious. But principally, it's the deviousness and distraction.
I mean, think about it. You are 15 and sat in a lesson on how to create a spreadsheet. This lesson is probably fairly boring to begin with. Mr. Teacher is droning on about cells, say, or tabs, or formulas. Your mind begins to wander. It's only natural that it does. I read somewhere that a teenager can only cope with two stimuli at once (bad news for a being with five senses to begin with) and has an attention span of, at best, ten minutes. If you are being boring, and Mr. Teacher is, cut that down to three.
But you are in an ICT lesson. There's a computer in front of you. Sure, the rules say that you are being monitored, but this is so boooring, and if old Teacher goes on much longer, you will most likely die, actually die, of boredom. The crushing weight of his droning voice and combover and gay looking goatee will kill you if you don't do something and fast. So maybe the answer is a little spin on Facebook. I mean, who's to know?
Me. I'm gonna know, because your computer is connected to mine, and I can see you. You, 06CunninghamL, room 18, station 15, looking at pictures of a party on MySpace since 11:34:19. Get back to work. At least, that's how it could work. In reality I don't have the time, or the job description, to do this. What I do is look through the log the next day, seeing who's typed the word fuck into Google. It records absolutely everything. And therein lies the trouble. It takes screengrabs of everything it's programmed to spot – meaning that we not only get the swearword in question but also everything else that's lurking nearby. And it does not discriminate between some harmless banter or the more private. So if you, for example, decide to candidly confess all about your boyf's stature in bed, or engage in a spot of text sex during a maths lesson, I will read about it, because you are going to use some fairly hefty trigger words. It also means I get lots of essays about either reproductive biology, demographics or Shakespeare.
I feel somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand, I used to be a teacher, and there is nothing more irritating that someone not listening, or even worse, quite blatantly doing something else. I got very good at spotting the word Bebo in people's system trays, people who seemed to think that because I was over 18 I was unaware that you can keep one window behind another. Now, when I was 18 this was in fact largely true, what with Windows being still fairly novel in schools and the average teacher being something like a thousand years old. But now, it's old news. So for that, fuck 'em. Get back to work. But at the same time, for a lifelong socialist libertarian, actually being Big Brother is not a nice feeling. I am violating their privacy in some way, even though they really know full well that we can see what they're doing. And yet still they do it. I have seen arguments, confessions, heartbreak and a very detailed account of someone losing their virginity in a car. It's not a nice feeling, as I said.
And I am pretty sure it's trouble anyway, especially with the aforementioned 1500 teenagers glued to it from 8:45am to 3:15pm, five days a week. This is my second reason to dislike Facebook. It reminds me too much of internet dating.It's neurosis on a plate. See, I was not always the happy go lucky type I appear to be. It was a while ago, but I was once a customer of Match.com. I was single, miserable and vulnerable to the promise of a promise. I signed on the dotted line. What came of it was... nothing. What a surprise.
But one thing it did have was an email function. This was the main engine of the site - read some people's pages, decide who takes your fancy, write off to them and then away you go, on the winding sunlit road to the evergreen uplands of the Valley of Happiness. For this, read if you are a woman, get swamped by messages from forty-nine men a day who are all utterly, utterly not what you asked for and of you are a man, get nothing. Like I said, happiness. But what was most evil about it was the fact that you could see if the recipient had been online recently, and then if they'd read your message. This I don't like. Because if you are, like me, a trembling wreck of a man, you see that Whatsername has logged in, mooched about and updated her favourite films to include House of 1000 Corpses and Ishtar, but hasn't replied to my fucking email, has she?
This can, unless approached with a depth of maturity which frankly none of us have, lead to stress, ulcers and death. But anyway, look at Facebook. It's exactly the same, does just the same thing. So-and-so has logged in, updated their status and fucked off. Now, imagine that depth of information about your mates, what your mates are doing and precisely what they thing about you (and also remember just how little tact a 16 year old has), at your fingertips. And imagine just how slighted by something entirely normal it was possible to be at 16. It's the odine in the gaping shotgun wound of adolescence. No wonder all they do is argue and hug each other, the precocious, back-stabbing little monsters.
But no longer. Because it's been banned. Enough is enough, and the dark side of networking has led to the rest of it all going away. Bullying, sex, just frittering away of time, it's all led to me having to write a policy for the school to ban it all. They'll moan and complain, try and find ways around it (I've banned them, too) and probably vandalise stuff when they finally give up, but I think they're most likely better off out of it. I bet we get our share of hate mail this week, though. And the spelling is going to be atrocious.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug
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