Have you noticed how social media is breeding a new level of
social incompetence amongst younger people? If you’re teenagery these days,
you’re more likely to engage with the opposite sex through some form of social
media and its attendant technology than you are an actual person. Teenage social
ineptitude is a common-enough ailment, and has been since Elvis invented the
teenager in 1955, but there’s a new strand of it in the world today, and it’s
fascinating.
What makes this even more interesting is the personality of
the one person who virtually invented social media as a form of human
interaction. Mark Zuckerberg is not by any means Mr Geniality, and that in
itself accounts for Facebook’s personality: a place for shy geeks to spy on hot
chicks without actually having to encounter them in the flesh and be rejected.
Interestingly, the use of Facebook seems to perpetuate
social ineptitude, not dispel it. Guys are asking girls out through messaging,
girls are using status updates to bitch at other girls, snide teenagery awfulness
is IM’d, BBM’d, SMS’d, tweeted and (SO last-year!) MixIt’d. Girls and guys
‘like’ and ‘unlike’ each other and announce their availablitiy, jiltedness or
successful coupling online. It’s a digitized storm of hormones, a ‘stormone’ if
you will.
This doesn’t exactly bode well for future international relations,
much less the propagation of the human race. In-the-flesh meetings are, after all,
so boringly one-dimensional after you’ve spent half the night looking at
someone’s pictures on their profile. Also, it’s much harder to think of the
right thing to say than to type, don’t you think?
So thanks, Mark. The Geeks shall inherit the
earth.
