The online environment is rapidly taking up so much time to monitor and maintain, that it is cutting right over the time usually set aside for actually doing stuff, real stuff, you know, like in the 'real' world. Honestly, I'm confused and exhausted, I was told 3 or 4 years ago that I 'must' join something called 'Bebo', a fashionable online social networking device. I signed up, comedy ensues. By the time I had 'told' all my long-lost friends what I'm now 'upto', chosen an appropriate image which I felt accurately represented myself, chosen a video, some pictures, a wallpaper (?) and a pet pirate-donkey, I had no time left to do anything else. 'Fine', I thought, surely the hard bit was done, and I could get on with the business of making lots of online acquaintances. Wrong. Not much time had passed, when I started to wonder why none of my new 010010101 online friends responded to my messages. When I asked one, I was told that 'Bebo' was no good anymore, it was old, outdated, and that I should join the FACEbook. Intimidated, frustrated, and a bit sleepy, I was adamant to resist the FACEbook, which if I am honest I doubted its literary worth, and that its use of the word book was perhaps un-just. Time passed. Eventually, about a year or so ago I joined this book of faces, but only because I wanted to keep in closer touch with my friend was travelling through Australia at the time and had adopted this as his key means of communication. So by now, I was creating something of a database of online personas. Some time passed, if I'm honest I do tend to browse the pages of facebook on a daily basis, whereas the bebo has subsided, and no doubt my profile page will lie dorment like some kind of online time-capsule which some computer nerd will find in 100 years and discover that I arranged to go to the pub on a Tuesday night one time long ago......
So, I had declared my alliance to the facebook, I have a fair few decent pictures of myself in various settings up there, and I can keep in touch with the majority of people I actually want to communicate with. I also regularly maintain my Windows Space, which kind of came free with the hotmail/MSN address I've had for years, there are a few friends on there which I have no other form of regular communication with, so it stays on my online agenda. And If I am honest, this 'space' was the birthplace of the Wise Panda, one day some time ago when these four words appeared in my head and made their way down to my fingertips and subsequently onto the world in front of me. I was told that If I wanted to really publicize any writings, then I should open a blog on Blogger. Until, what I can imagine is a fairly short time ago, these words (blog, blogger) were not words, yet now they common words (such as: tarpaulin, apple, and radiator). And, so here we are. I have a new online persona here on blogger, as well as on facebook, windows spaces and bebo (not to mention the numerous emails from 'friends', who now say I must join something called 'Twatter'). With all these to maintain I have little time to engage in actual 'social networking', but then again maybe this new online version of socializing is the 'actual' version of it. I don't even know anymore. In any case, no matter what you think about them they are here and will probably go nowhere but continue to thrust their 'innovative' and 'liberating' sense of engagement and citizenship into our ever-electronicized (not a word, yet) lifestyle. What ever happened to pooh-sticks?
I like pooh sticks. I always win. We should go play pooh sticks. I like saying Pooh sticks.
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