I just pwned someone hard. [ignore this if you don't like reading]

[Casey]

I was having a debate on an internal work forum. The woman in question had a view of social networking sites being egotistical and nerdy, and claimed that her 21 year old daughter and her friends and university had grown bored of the "novelty" factor and stopped using these sites.

Here's what happened:

"Using blogs as your main method of communication is the standard thing amongst my generation."

I would beg to differ. I have a 21 year old daughter - (I'm not that old myself, 40 in fact, and perfectly capable of using this type of technology so don't think that it is somehow the preserve of your generation) at university in Brighton. She and most of her mates all initially signed up for these things, used them for a while but then the novelty wore off and they got back to having an actual life instead of a virtual one. They're too busy to sit alone in front of computers blogging away. They've all got lectures, coursework, jobs, social lives and families taking up their time.

By the way, I knew what mark all my mates got in their degree because we discussed it in the pub while we were getting drunk to celebrate.

Sorry, but I think it's all just a little bit nerdy/egotistical

I then hit back with this:

No need to get in a huff - I was in no way insinuating that you were somehow old and out of touch with technology. My sincerest apologies if that is how you interpreted what I said.

Firstly, I would argue that your daughter is the exception, not the rule. You also suggest that they saw it as something with a "novelty factor". Most people of this generation would actually view it as a part of life. You also mention having an "actual life instead of a virtual one". I'd like to be the first to inform you that the two are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps you were unaware of this, hence your outdated opinion of blogging as being something "nerdy".

Secondly, I suggest you take a look at your daughters' Facebook profile, assuming she has one. She may use it more than you think.

But, for arguments' sake, I'll take what you said in black and white. You claim that your daughter and her circle of friends quickly grew tired of having an online presence and now solely communicate via so-called "real-life" methods. I'll break this down:

A) Either by some magical coincedence, all of your daughters' high school friends ended up going to the same University,

or B) She is neglecting them in favor of her college friends.

Seeing as they are so busy with "lectures, coursework, jobs, social lives and families", this would warrant keeping up-to-date with these friends via the telephone medium, which is very ineffective at constant communcation in this day and age, not to mention time-consuming - time being something you suggest that they do not have a lot of. Perhaps you feel that friendships can not exist outside of a local radius.

You also make a mention of "sit[ting] alone in front of computers". This is where I beg to differ. The majority of us actually blog and update our status on social networks via our smartphones, whilst multitasking. For example, my band are headlining at Glastonbury next week. A lot of my friends can't be there, so I will be updating from the festival, taking pics with my camera phone and instantly uploading them to facebook, ie: "Here's a picture of my tent. It collapsed after I took this photo. Now I'm lying in the mud somewhere whilst two dreadlocked hippies are getting high and singing Bob Marley songs less than 5 metres away". Whilst we're on stage, our camera crew will be filming professionally shot footage for our next project, but also our fans lucky enough to attend will be filming us on their camera phones and uploading the footage instantly to YouTube, for the benefit of our worldwide fanbase, which is great for us in particular, since we have a much larger international fanbase than domestic one.

A lot more interesting to them as it's happening, rather than a hazy recap of a whole weekends events written 2 days later.

Finally, I'd like to make the point that I, and most people, have friends at various Universities, cities and countries. In the UK alone, at pretty much every corner of the country from Edinburgh to Exeter. Perhaps, in your mind, it would be less "nerdy/egostistical" for me to make a mission around the entire country, and maybe book a few flights to Los Angeles, Philadelphia and India to my friends at Universities there in order to have a congratulatory drink. (no need to catch up, we already update each other on interesting events via facebook on a daily basis). Sorry, but I'm too busy with my work etc, not to mention I don't have the time, or the money.

But perhaps you'd rather I ignore all those people since it's obviously not possible to have a tight-knit friendship with anyone that doesn't share your local pub.

She has yet to respond.

 

[Tha_Wood]

haha i doubt she will respond, you made her look like a fool. good work

 

[Casey]

haha i doubt she will respond, you made her look like a fool. good work

lol thanks man. Yeah I can't think of anything she would come back with, I pretty much broke her down from all angles. Anyone that views stuff like MySpace as nerdy is obviously living in the stone ages. I don't get why some people think that an "e-life" is a replacement for a "real-life". That's some seriously backward thinking.

 

[hizzle?]

TOTAL PWNAGE! BWAHHHHH

what was the context of that discussion??

 

[Casey]

TOTAL PWNAGE! BWAHHHHH

what was the context of that discussion??

It originally started as a discussion about Facebook, stemming from the facebook section where you can state your political preference, and people saying that members of the BBC network should avoid this - as you know the BBC must be seen to be impartial, especially when it comes to politics.

Then that bird started saying how blogging and social networking sites were nerdy. I had said I keep in contact with my friends that live every where that day, and had just found out a good friend got a 2:1 in her degree through her facebook status, to which she replied with that remark I posted saying that she knew her friends results because they got drunk in the pub to celebrate, and that she's got better things to do than sit in front of a computer to communicate with her friends.

Anyway, she did end up replying to me but couldn't answer any of my points so tried to steer the discussion into a new direction.

She said

I'm only contributing to this discussion because I have to sit at my desk and wait for the phone to ring as that's how our dept works. It's a slow period and I'm bored, but I can assure there is no way I would sit at my computer at home and log onto discussion forums or blogs because I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO!!!

again, I'm sitting here at a desk I can't get up from. There are very few activities open to me. The difference therefore is I'm doing this because I'm trapped at my desk and have nothing better to do, I would not choose to do this if I had other options. I would not sit in my room or wherever relentlessly blogging and networking my life away online.

Plus, I'm taking part in a discussion, not documenting my life in the belief it's so fascinating to others they'd waste their time sitting reading about it.

From what Isabel said, you must spend hours and hours of your own free time doing this becaues of the huge list of these type of sites your name comes up on. Each to their own but that to me seems more than a little bit ego driven and somewhat sad.

Anyway, some work's come in so I have to go, I'm afraid

so i replied with :

Ah well, it depends on your definition of "better things to do". I contribute to discussion forums at home because I enjoy participating in intellectual discussion. Admittedly that is less to do with social networking.

However, as I previously said, many of us multitask these days. I may update my blog and add photos that my friends would enjoy to see whilst in the middle of doing something else. Such is the power of today's technology.

As for your daughter, Jo, how are you to know that she doesn't have close friends many miles away? What superior methods would you suggest she utilize in order to keep constant contact and an always open instant communication line with these friends, since she doesn't have the option of wandering over to their place of abode and having a drink with them?

As for the comments being about ego and self-obsessiveness - that is implying she feels she is somehow more important than everyone else on there she is friends with. Considering all of her friends on there will be doing the same thing, how is it any more self-obsessed than anyone else? Surely you're not suggesting that all the 100's of millions of people using social networking websites are self obsessed? I have a good friend in Las Vegas, she and her 50 year old mother communicate constantly through their myspaces because they live many hundred of miles away from each other. Would you say both mother and daughter in this situation are self obsessed?

 

[Prize Gotti]

You forgot to mention that MySpace is the most visited site on the internet. I assume YouTube follows a close second.

 

[S O F I]

well...if you can't pwn anybody on streethop...might as well downgrade

 

[Casey]

well...if you can't pwn anybody on streethop...might as well downgrade

Yeah...because BBC employees are generally less intelligent than your average member of a hip-hop forum

 

[Jokerman]

My god are you nerdy and egotistical.

 

[S O F I]

She said

"From what Isabel said, you must spend hours and hours of your own free time doing this becaues of the huge list of these type of sites your name comes up on. Each to their own but that to me seems more than a little bit ego driven and somewhat sad."

You do know that's pwnage, right? MAJOR.

 

[Casey]

She said

You do know that's pwnage, right? MAJOR.

She wasn't talking to me. She was talking to someone else in that part. I'll quote that whole section tomorrow so you can understand a bit better. (it's an intranet one so i can't access it from home)

Basically there was another guy in the topic that was saying something about using loads of different social sites and syncing them together via RSS feeds. I think he was somebody that used Flickr, and that other one where you just post little status updates a lot at a time.

My name doesn't come on hardly any sites when you search for it. Since this was on a internal BBC forum, it was using my real name. That was part of a different conversation within the same thread, it wasn't just me and her posting in there. I just couldn't be bothered to edit out the irrelevant parts of her post before I quoted her on here.

Sorry SOFI, I didn't get majorly pwned. Maybe next time. I'll let you know since I'm sure it would provide you hours of entertainment.

 

[Casey]

for the benefit of SOFI who seemed interested in who was getting pwned in that conversation, the part he referenced was nothing to do with me, and went as follows:

Up to you Tom but I just Googled you and got 1740 results - Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, Moontan, myBlog etc., etc

You get quite a big footprint doing all that!

I got 67 for my name but I do post a lot on family history websites and there are at least 2 other Isabel [name removed] in the web world.

I don't think personal is the opposite of public. My private life and my personal life are also two different things.

My personal blog is public. But I don't publish private stuff on there.

How do you have time for a life when, according to Isabel's Google search you relentlessly post on Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, Moontan, myBlog? It's just staggering.

Hasn't this discussion now totally gone egotistical?

And what's the difference between this and Facebook?

Tom - again, I'm sitting here at a desk I can't get up from. There are very few activities open to me. The difference therefore is I'm doing this because I'm trapped at my desk and have nothing better to do, I would not choose to do this if I had other options. I would not sit in my room or wherever relentlessly blogging and networking my life away online.

Plus, I'm taking part in a discussion, not documenting my life in the belief it's so fascinating to others they'd waste their time sitting reading about it.

From what Isabel said, you must spend hours and hours of your own free time doing this becaues of the huge list of these type of sites your name comes up on. Each to their own but that to me seems more than a little bit ego driven and somewhat sad.

There you go.


Note - I'd never heard of Moontan, Jaiku or myBlog before these people mentioned it. It seems like every day there's some sort of new blog site of one variation or another.

 

[Sebastian]

To all those who actually read all these posts, would you please say who you are? Im curious.