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Anti-Social Network |
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Trending = Flocking
As some of my "friends" may have noticed, I periodically go on and off Facebook. First of all, it’s amazing how many people take this personally and automatically assume they have been blocked. I can understand this insecurity. I can understand them all. We have entered the New Age World--a world where it is all about us, all the time.
Everything we touch is personalized, from our iPods to our ads on Facebook. It’s only a matter of time before the electronic billboards in department stores change as we walk by depending on our wealth of preferences that have been culled and are beaming from our Smartphone or better yet, the chip under our skin. (The powers that be are testing it as we speak). In a world where everything is personalized, everyone is bound to take everything personally.
The best example of this is blitz-texting someone, yelling at them in ALL CAPS for ignoring you, instead of making the logical assumption that perhaps their phone died or they passed out. C’mon. Admit it. We’ve all been there. And if you haven’t acted on those insecurities—you’ve thought about it.
Some people have social anxiety. I have social network anxiety. Big time. Due to attending 13 schools in 12 years, my New Girl Complex runs deep—even to this day. The uncomfortable feelings of wanting to belong and searching for mass approval that I worked so hard to leave behind me in high school, started up all over again when I first put Phetasy online and realized that, in order for it to survive as an online business, it had to be cool.
Uh-oh. I was never very good at that. And far worse than the meanest cool kids at any high school, are the cool kids of the Internet. Nowhere before has snobbery and hipper-than-thou culture run rampant and thrived than in the protective bubble of anonymity the World Wide Web provides.
Back at the time when I was trying to make Phetasy a viable business, I wanted you to read this blog. And I would have tried to get you to read it. Soon enough there were all these great tools to promote your self and your business. “Social networks” they called them. If you had a company or a website, soon there was an enormous amount of pressure to have a presence at these online Community Centers.
As we all know now, or so we hope, the InterWeb is made up of real people. People are social creatures who have been creating hierarchies and status symbols since the dawn of time. So it stands to reason that we would recreate these very same structures even out of the ether. Within these pecking orders, some people are popular and some people aren’t. I was never very popular. Anywhere. On or offline.
Facebook and Twitter did nothing to help heal these old wounds. In fact, if anything, it reopened opened them with a constant, generous helping of salt. Whether the social network is actual, or virtual, I still feel like an outsider looking in; because the online world is like one, giant high school and Facebook its giant yearbook.
Browsing through pictures of people with their perfect, cute families and their perfect, cute group of college friends, elicits that same feeling it gave me in High School. The heebie-jeebies. It was a system I was never a part of, a club I never belonged to, a family ideal that my family would never live up to. Seeing all my “friends” in L.A. tagged at concerts, events and local pubs gathered with their “crew”, tagged in weddings and bachelorette parties--I feel the same wave of insecurity that used to hit me sitting alone at a lunch table.
But now it's more than that because we live online. There is a whole, fake world out there made of 1’s and 0’s. And we’re not just talking about code. In the online world, attention equates to dollars. Quite simply, the more popular you are, the more you are worth. The more traffic you get on your site, blog, vlog, or video…the more advertising money you can command. Getting attention is no longer just a simple psychological desire for approval, now it’s about survival.
So the battle wages on.
Everyone is fighting for your attention, everywhere you turn. Not just the old standards: media empires and advertising agencies, but EVERYONE. Every brand, every celebrity, every reality star, Dancing with the Stars star, porn star and celebrity whore is cashing in on their 15 seconds and virtually begging for your attention. Your friends want you to join a cause, your sister wants you to promote her friends band, someone you barely know wants you to be in their “Mafia” or work their “farm”. In the online world, if you get attention, for good or for bad, you can make money. And money might not buy happiness, but it does buy food.
In his brilliant book and what has become my bible for navigating the new age world, Mediated, author Thomas De Zengotita writes about all this self-reflexivity and exactly how these frightening new levels of self-consciousness are transforming our lives and permanently altering our view of the very world we perceive to live in.
He describes this postmodern process of assimilating everything in an “osmotic process calibrated to enfold the tiniest, most private gestures of your secret life and contain your sense of the universe and the meaning of love and death as well…” and rendering it an optional representation of itself you eventually become indifferent to as “The Blob”. He writes:
“The problem with trying to comprehend the process of mediation is that you can’t get outside it. It is like a shadow that expends no energy and makes no effort, yet never falters. Perpetual reflexivity is haunting.”
This book came out in 2005, at the dawn of social networks, when Facebook was still considered “MySpace for elitists” as Phetasy's Director of Cool described it at the time. I only wonder what De Zengotita has to say now, just a six years later with outlets like Twitter revolutionizing the way we get our news.
At least the People of Facebook are somewhat decent. The People of Twitter are downright mean. I’m WILDLY unpopular with “Tweeters”, (which I actually take as a compliment). Every time I open my mouth, I lose a “follower” (a term that completely creeps me out). If there was actually a way to have NEGATIVE followers (“shunners” as I would call them), I’m pretty sure I’d be leader of that pack.
The truth is, most large brands and media outlets were caught with their pants down when it came to marketing themselves on the social media platform. My friend Dusty started the fan page for Coca-Cola very early on just because he loves Coke and drinks a six-pack a day. It got 7 million fans almost overnight. It was only a matter of time before Dusty was getting a call from Coke asking for their fan page back. He and his friend now work with Coke creating viral videos and in collaboration with Coca-Cola Marketing, manage the page.
In the new world, even fame isn’t good enough for The Blob. To me there is something very odd about having to self-promote when you’re already famous. Isn’t that the point of self-promotion? Isn't that one of the perks of fame, not needing to fight for attention anymore? For some reason I find something pathetic about a famous person with a Twitter account (unless it's Conan). But now the studios expect you to have a presence online. They expect you to have a personal relationship to your fans. It's written into your contract and part of their marketing plan. This is The Blob at work. And everything we see has been absorbed by it.
Even CNN has a Twitter page. That might seem like an obvious statement today. Two years ago it wasn’t. I was sick in bed during Ashton’s great race against CNN to get a million followers and become the TwitterKing. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Was the respected journalistic institution I relied on for my current events actually having to pander to and compete with the guy from Dude, Where’s My Car? It was like the equivalent of watching The New York Times go head-to-head with UsWeekly. Why would they even bother sinking to that level? Because, just like the sad, Tweeting celebrities, they had to. We are all our own Networks now. Each one of us, individually, has the power to become our own brand, even if it's based on nothing more than hype or trashiness. Just ask the Kardashians. Or Snooki.
I quickly got to work taking Twitter for a test ride, using it as a weapon of mass irritation and managed to alienate and get blocked by Ashton and his cougar wife within minutes of mocking the ridiculousness of it all. Holy shit! They were listening to and pandering to me now! I matter!?! They actually care, one way or another, what I think! That’s pathetic! I’m just a loser with a cold and 14 followers! Has the whole world lost its mind? Ashton later called it a “social media revolution”. I called it another Sign of the Impending Apocalypse.
During my Twitter ranting, I also managed to piss off a couple of Internet hipsters, online snobs and self-proclaimed tricksters in the process. I honestly don’t even try. This kind of repelling effect can only come naturally.
Just like the cool factor comes naturally. Which is why the cool kids never accepted me, even when I had climbed all the right ladders and played the right games: deep down inside, I was always a nerd.
But, thanks to the Internet being created by geeks, nerd is the new cool kid and now I’m not nerdy enough to be considered cool by the coolest nerds online. The Blob strikes again. I can’t keep up with pop culture because I’m too busy re-reading Crime and Punishment (it’s a novel) or writing in my journal that’s not online. (By hand. With pens). I just got cable television two months ago for crying out loud.
No matter what the definition of cool is in this ever-changing landscape, you can be sure it won’t be my picture next to the word in the Urban Dictionary. It’s impossible. It will forever elude me. This aspect of my nature will NEVER change. No matter what, I’m destined to be a giant, unpopular dork. It was written in the stars long ago.
My web designers always give me shit for doing everything wrong when it comes to my SEO tactics. I never use Meta Keywords. I don’t enter a Meta Description. They joke that I have managed to build a 400-page “invisible website”. They rage against my cockamamie (I prefer eccentric) idea of Visiting Hours, where I take the site down for weeks at a time, or I just leave it up for certain hours of the day.
I like it that way. Because the one thing that hasn’t been absorbed by The Blob is Phetasy; and as long as people keep asking me what the Hell this website is or what Phetasy means, it never will be. I’ve realized I can be myself here and for the most part, be left alone. Now, I don’t care if anyone ever reads it.
In fact, I intend to keep Phetasy invisible for as long as possible. Because the minute Phetasy becomes visible, it becomes viable, which makes it cool and means a whole lot more work for me. And the minute Phetasy is something that is “cool” I’m not going belong here anymore.
So do me a favor, if you are 1 of the 2 people reading this, I would really appreciate if you DON’T tell your “friends” about this site. Please don’t tweet about us to @aplusk or any of his Twitter minions. Let us keep this a special place for the dorks and outcasts. Fuck the Inner Circle. We here on Phetasy have started our own Anti-Social Network for the loners of the world. We call it---The Outer Square. We believe in taking time to disconnect, deactivate and unplug. Our motto: Escape The Blob, go off the grid, head into the wilderness alone where there is no GPS, no internet and no ability to tell the whole world wide web who are and just Be Yourself. Your soul will appreciate the attention.
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