FudBook

For voyeurs and narcissists, Facebook is a digital Xanadu – the Internet equivalent of getting undressed in the bedroom with the curtains open. Except now your audience isn’t just the local peeping tom, but a bevy of discarded friends and workmates from yesteryear.

Deep within, our subconscious harbours an irresistible urge to be a conceited voyeur: it’s reassuring to discover that wee Jimmy from Primary 6 is still a fat loser, and that the once gorgeous Jenny is a now a frumpy hag. We sit smugly in front of our PC, exulting our school chums descent into middle-aged oblivion. Suddenly our mundane trudge through life feels slightly lighter under foot. Pathetic, eh?

For the narcissist, it’s a chance to assemble a mosaic of a fantasy life; all your flattering photos and favourite sound bites mixed into a pot pourri of happiness – nights out, holidays, gigs – look at me; my life is one non-stop Mardi Gras. Yet when you peer through the smoke and mirrors you’ll discover, more often than not, a facsimile of contentment. A vain digital urge to keep up with Joneses; where the privet hedges, white fences and BMWs have been replaced with the cold whirr of a spinning hard drive.

For those who require constant validation of there own self worth, the obligatory wall comment is a panacea: “Just back from a luxurious city break in Milan”. It also doubles as a dais for the opinionated; who delight in having a captive audience, of sycophants, who will humour their rants and massage their ego: “Aren’t women drivers just the worst!!! Today I was parking…”. Yawn.

Societies’ casualties, forsaken friends and ex-lovers all lurk in the shadows of cyberspace. Social networking sites are portals for these disenchanted souls, where they can reconnect with you under the guise of long lost amity. Beware! An innocent looking friend request, from teenage sweetheart Tanya, may open a wormhole into a past life you no longer care to remember. Father time can be scathing.

Then there’s Twitter: the retarded in-bred cousin of Facebook, who can only grunt in 250 words or less. Banality personified, do I really want to read that Chevy Chase has taken a dump? What’s next – Amoeba-babble: where you communicate by shutting your eyelid like the dude in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Call me traditional, but I believe the Internet was created so that man could surf porn and abuse himself, in the seclusion of his own bedroom, with the curtains tightly drawn. Now that’s the type of self-indulgent, narcissism that is permissible.

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