Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Effacebook

Except you can't. Your account can only be deactivated which means that all the information you have gleefully provided will stay on record for the benefit of your (and indeed their) friends. Behind the funky façade is a huge information gathering network to which businesses can refer when constructing consumer profiles and, increasingly, targeting products at individuals.
Salespersons' sleep is disturbed every night by the haunting images of people placidly perusing on their PCs dangerously astray from their PR's seductive cries. Let their dreams trouble them no more, for Facebook can forage its database and bring to the world of wide webs alluring ads aplenty which will not be wanting in moneyed people's attention now that the siren calls of virtual vending venues will be relished for their reassurance and relevance. People shall no longer be abandoned to their own devices in this sea of uncertain, unbound information, rather, in Facebook, there has come a place for consumers to come together and buy alone.
Where there was once your average Joe-five-carlings there is now a new breed of people who are enabled to portray themselves as they wish, cutting and editing their photos, reviewing their own lives, reinventing their profiles. They no longer have to yearn for the youthful looks of the fashionably dressed, skincare virtuoso or the incredibly supple afro, of the black music-listener who dances in the middle of the road, spontaneous like it was the most natural thing in the world. No, now they can actually be these aspirationaries, god-like in their virtual domain. Full of freedom, empowerment (I mean real empowerment: the sort menstruating women experience while using sanitary towels), confident in strides and ivory white during sudden explosions of boisterous mirth. They now possess all the traits of their cathodic idols, those very same who would once abruptly interrupt their product-placement viewing to remind them of their utter inadequateness.
Well who is a long, complicated word now? Take that Mr. Conformist-hair-style-which-breaks-the- mold-and-sends-a-decade-old-regime-crumbling! As of now, I'm worth it too!!!
Today, typical Teddy-two-tennents is the advert, his Facebook profile has become everything that surrounded what the model was driving slash holding slash wearing... wait a minute?
Do you have said concerted-gaiety-bringer, Teddy?
No?!? Well, you know what to do... ah, look, a link!

Nobody likes a liar.