STORMONE

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.

THE CYBER-STRUGGLE

Recent and ongoing political upheaval (and dare I say it, revolution) in the Middle East is the first of its kind to be dubbed 'cyber-resistance'. From Egypt to Syria, people have been informed, persuaded and inspired, not to say mobilized, by social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. So much so that the ousting of Egypt's Mubarak has been labeled the 'Facebook Revolution', while the earlier protests in Iran following that country's 2009 presidential elections have become known as the "Twitter Revolution".

Whether this is media-hype or not is beside the point. The internet is a powerful tool, and Twitter and Facebook are the means to a lot more interesting ends than banal, vapid status -envy.

With this is mind, here's a bit of what-if: what would Apartheid in South Africa have looked like if the internet and its' attendant social networking capabilities had existed during, say, the 1970's and '80's? 

How would the banned and exiled ANC have used Twitter to rally the people of South Africa against the Apartheid regime?

How would the beleaguered National Party government have made use of Facebook to marshal the troops to hold back the tidal wave of Die Swart Gevaar?

It's an intriguing fantasy. Of course, humanity doesn't need technology to affect political discourse, but it sure helps. Kira Baiasu makes the point in a piece entitled Social Media: A Force For Political Change in Egypt, saying that social networking gives protestors invaluable anonymity, instant access to the masses and an opportunity to politicize an otherwise apathetic or disinterested body politic.

So allow yourself to imagine the Struggle on Twitter. Umkhonto we Sizwe's Facebook profile. The Robben Island group page. The 1976 Soweto Uprising sending out invites. End Conscription Campaign emails. Black Sash tweets. Chris Hani's status updates. 

Or, for that matter, AWB blogs, National Party 'likes' and SADF Google campaigns.

I'm not trying to be facetious. I would love your suggestions on what could've been.

Of course, the obvious next step then is, "Well, if not then, why not now?"

No wonder Julius Malema suggested closing down Twitter last year...