The scenario:
You’re minding your own business, probably sat at home on a quiet weekend watching some TV when there’s a knock at the door. You answer it and immediately you’re poked in the chest by someone you don’t know! “Poooke! Hi, it’s me! John, from school! Remember?”.
You have no idea who this person is. “Want to be friends?” he asks. You reluctantly agree, hoping it’ll send him away. “Great, where did we meet?”. What? He knows where we met… “Do you wish to ignore this step?”, you look puzzled, what? Ignore? You reiterate to him that you met at school. “Great, can I confirm that we met at school?”. Uh… yes. “Ok cool. So what are you looking for? Friendship, dating or whatever you can get?” You’re starting to get a little worried now.
Then you notice that someone is spray painting a crude message on the wall of your house: “Alright mate! Ya dickhead! lololl”. You inquire as to what the hell he’s playing at. “Writing on your wall! Everyone can see it!”
John pops his head back into view. “So I’ve got some pictures here from school. Remember this one? Look at you, drunk, passed out in the bath covered in sick and urine.” The pictures even have captions! “I can show everyone these pics of you. Your girlfriend, work mates, real friends. You don’t get a say! How great is that?!” says John. You ask him if you can have those pictures. You don’t want people to see them. Nope. You can’t have them.
The phone rings. You answer it: “John has suggested that you be friends with all these people, blah blah, blah. John wants to play scrabble with you. John wants to know where he ranks in your list of friends! John has a host of other contrived mundane requests.”
We’ll end it there, since you’ve probably guessed what I’m writing about now. Facebook. If that happened in real life, you’d get pretty pissed off pretty quickly. Or at least I know I would.
It’s not just Facebook. The web is quickly evolving into a place where everyone seems to feel the need to know everything about everyone else. Why would anyone want to know what I’m upto every 5 minutes with twitter? Who’s sad enough to sit and watch a twitter feed. Who’s sad enough to maintain twitter feed? Is your life that boring that you need to know that in 5 minutes you’ll have a status update of what John is doing on his sofa at home? Is your life that boring that you have nothing more important to do than post your current status to a website every 5 minutes?
What of this whole picture thing? Why should someone be able to post a picture of me online, without my permission and label it with my name!? Sure that’s not a new thing to the internet, but never before would that picture be associated with a page detailing everything about me!
Why is it OK to do these things online when in the real world, this is the exact behaviour that would be exhibited by a stalker or someone soon to be slapped with an ASBO?
