Weirdo Alert
- Apr 22, 2015
- 2 min read
I’m dipping my toe in the wider online community and the water feels cold and unfamiliar. I know it will be alright once I’m in and start paddling, but at the outset, few things feel less sociable than social networking.
Facebook seems pretty straightforward and is kind of a soft entrance. Your Facebook friends are all friends, at least at first, in the traditional sense of the word. You know what they look like and sound like and you’ve a good idea what makes them laugh and what’s important to them. Or at least you like to think you do. Whatever, you have shared experiences.
Twitter’s sort of interactive, but with people you don’t know and who have no idea who you are. The modus operandi, as I understand it, is to trawl the Twitter site, looking for people who seem to have something interesting to say or at least have similar interests to yours. Then you follow them, sniffing along their virtual spoor like a bloodhound, wondering if they’ll look over their shoulder and see you there behind them, on all fours, with one wary eye on them and your nose pressed to the cyberfloor. At that point, hopefully, you’ll have littered your own wake with enough bon mots and selected retweets to catch their attention and they’ll follow you. Or maybe they won’t bother.
Then there’s blogging. At this stage, it certainly seems to be the strangest of the networking media because it’s a monologue. You’re the new kid at school who doesn’t know anybody. You’re sitting all alone in a corner of the playground where the sun never gets and, what’s worse, you’re talking to yourself. Not just muttering, but loud, confident, like a lot of people are listening. Weirdo alert. Next you’ll be clawing at yourself and eating flies.
But you’re not alone. Every shady nook of the playground - and there are an awful lot of them - holds a babbler just like you. Some shrieking, some turning cartwheels and some exposing intimate parts of themselves in an effort to get noticed.
I’m not sure if that’s comforting or rather disturbing, but here I am. Anyone want to try one one of these flies? They're delicious.
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