There is an e-mail in the inbox, alerting me that my online friend Pieman has
written another blog entry, which I can read on his website. Pieman, a New
Orleans resident with an obsessive interest in mainstream 1980s pop stars,
is becoming delusional. He complains that he has spotted Annie Lennox
binge-eating in his kitchen. Lennox lawyers take note: I am certain the
whole scenario is fantasy, but I read on: “Her public persona may be that of
a sexually ambiguous, sparrow-like Scots songstress, but when she stays with
us, she eats like a pig.”
I put Pieman’s mad ranting down to some sort of post-Katrina stress disorder,
though I fear if I challenge his version of events, he will crack up
altogether. I write, “I can see how Lennox has become a real thorn in your
side,” but can’t bring myself to finish, having never written to a dog
before.
Pieman is a canine with a dog blog on My Space, the enormous web community for
people, bands and canines to network and showcase their interesting lives,
or psychological pathologies, depending on who’s writing them. Through My
Space (owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times), you
“meet” virtual friends, but only if they have My Space websites too. I
suspect that Pieman’s web diary is written by his human companion, Paul, who
thinks blogging is naff, a vehicle for the self-aggrandising. But if he does
it through the dog, anthropomorphically, and makes it weird (Lennox et al.)
it adds a layer of protective irony that is OK.
Similarly, I am slightly disturbed to find that my daughter has created a My
Space website for one of our cats, Nancy. My daughter doesn’t “do” irony.
From it, I learn that she is single and doesn’t want kids, which is a
relief, as I had her neutered last year (the cat, not my kid). Another
friend of mine hosts a website through the persona of a bespectacled geek
who likes Goth music and works in a pie factory. “Herbert” writes that his
best friend is Tom, the My Space online community manager, who has more than
100 million “friends”. “But I’d like to think that Tom and I have something
more special,” Herbert writes.
Anyone who puts up a website through My Space gets an automatic virtual friend
in Tom, a 30-year-old everyman whose interests include “language, culture
and karaoke”. When I succumbed to the vanity of a personal website on My
Space, I deleted Tom, as his ubiquity and love of “culture” put me off.
Besides, Tom had ignored my invitations to come to a karaoke bar with
Pieman, Nancy, Herbert and myself. To recap: Herbert, who is not real, has
an imaginary friendship with Tom, who may or may not be real, and is also
friends with Pieman and Nancy, who are real, but don’t actually write the
content of their websites.
The line between fantasy and reality in cyberspace is getting ever more
blurred, what with all this irony and many blatant lies. Friends who do online
dating, for example, say that in cyberspace everyone is at least ten
years younger (just post a younger picture of yourself on your site), and is
50 to 100 grand a year richer. Herbert the factory worker earns an honest
£12,500 a year, but honesty here is relative, as Herbert himself does not
exist. But Ralph, who is a real 32, puts his age down as 29 (a modest lie,
but a lie nonetheless), and he will remain 29 for the foreseeable future,
because he doesn’t really want to “meet” anyone older than 29 or be friends
with anyone who would hang out with ancient 32-year-olds. He’s upped his
income to 250 grand plus. His defence is “everybody lies on the internet”.
If this is so, how horrifying then that a recent survey found that 43 per cent
of internet users “feel as strongly” about their virtual community as they
do about their real-life friends. What can this mean? If you take Ralph’s
line that everybody is making everything up, it suggests that a significant
proportion of people like their imaginary friends as much as their real
ones. If you see, or indeed use, online communities as a way of meeting
people in real life (through online dating or common interest groups), what
does that say about how difficult it is to meet new people in real life?
Perhaps it’s harder because everyone is at home, writing to their virtual
friends on the web?
The good news is that nearly all those surveyed said that internet use had no
effect on the real-life time spent with friends and family. Well, that’s a
relief. But in my house that might translate to my daughter spending two
hours “chatting” to a My Space chum who lives within spitting distance of
us, while I am reading in the same room.
In My Space you can be “friends” with any celebrity who has a My Space
website. So my daughter is friends with Lily Allen and I am friends with the
crooner Richard Hawley, but neither of them has been round for tea. The
survey shows that regular internet users have 4.6 friends whom they have
never met in person. That fractional friend, that point six, speaks volumes
for the notional nature of these friendships. Is six tenths of a friend
going to join you in the pub, get his round in, get on with your real
friends? I suspect not. But perhaps we will do away with real friends
entirely and consort only with all the young, rich and interesting people
and pets in cyberspace.
Pass the sick bag, please
With the Christmas party season here, it’s a good time to ask if morning-after
apologies along the lines of “It was the drink talking” actually mean
anything. An American showbiz story outlining all the ineffectual public
apologies in politics and showbusiness this year — including one from
Michael Richards (Kramer in Seinfeld) for his racist comments about
black people, and Mel Gibson’s for his drunken anti-Semitic comments — came
to the conclusion that apologising is the new black. But no light was shed
on whether being drunk is the ultimate get-out clause for speaking rubbish
or if it removes inhibitions to the extent of exposing what people really
think. Who can know in Britain where “It’s better out than in” is less an
encouragement to spill your innermost thoughts and more an excuse to spill
your innermost stomach contents.
Juvenile cynicism
We had the MORI guy at our home, wanting to grill the children on kiddie
cereal brands. I was horrified to find out just how brand-aware they are,
telling the MORI man that honey-coated sugar nuggets were “cool” and cookie
crispies dipped in marshmallow were “friendly”. I kept interrupting: “Hold
on, how can a cereal be friendly? Have you got food issues? Have you got
friends?” The guy was here for what seemed like an eternity, and when he
left, my marketing-savvy kids said that after about the fourth question they
would have said anything about cereal — that they would marry the
Honey Monster — if it made him go away faster, but someone kept questioning
the questioner, which made it take “for, like, ever!”
