The McBournie Minute: Social media makes my life worth it

Oh my god, I just checked my Facebook page and you’ll never believe who’s “It’s Complicated” now! Also, I totally just added the magical egg app to my profile, so now you can give me eggs and we can see what they hatch into!

For those of you who have no idea what just happened, you can probably turn off your computer now, but I’m guessing the vast majority of people reading this (seven) know exactly what that means, but cannot for the life of them translate it into English. This is what happens when a fad comes around. Social media is not a fad. It is a genre of fad that is new this decade and will probably not go away until we can find something to replace it. It has to be something even newer. (Sorry, Tamagochi.)

Social media really sucks, folks. I know, SG has a MySpace page, a Facebook page, heck, we even have a Twitter profile, and I am no exception, (you like how I worked those in?) but really, what does any of this do? I will admit, I enjoy stalking high school girls as much as the next average Internet user, but haven’t we become a little self-involved?

It started off really with instant messaging. Suddenly, we could communicate with people by text instead of having to call them. It was like a chat room. But IM, regardless of which of the 56,053 platforms you choose, did not really take off until the advent of the away message and the IM profile. Now, we could let people know that we were “eatin’ dinner” or cryptically quote a song that we think speaks to us at that particular moment in time. Best of all, we could put a specific amount of information in our IM profiles. We got to define ourselves that much more. Then our parents caught on and we had to move to something new.

Luckily, it was the dawn of social media networking sites. There were tons of these at first, but soon got whittled down to MySpace for the most part. MySpace was cool because you could fill out your personal information and upload pictures of yourself, plus you could leave pointless, sparkly messages on someone’s profile page and blog about it, too! You could customize your profile theme and choose what song you wanted people to hear before they cursed at their computers and hit the pause button. Then our parents found out about MySpace too, and the cool people sought out a new site to upload their lives to.

Enter Facebook. Facebook was massively popular with college students a few years ago because it was only for college students. Best of all, your college had to be added in order to join. (Still no one has thanked me for adding Radford University.) Once Facebook got big enough, it opened itself up to everyone with an email address. Fortunately no one noticed for a few years. It grew with high schoolers and foreigners, but now our parents have found us once again. They are now getting into adding apps that make you send invitations to the apps to your friends. Best of all, now our parents are getting ads directed at them based on the content of their profiles! So Facebook is dying out, even if no one’s ready to see it or admit it.

So what’s next? Well, the most obvious answer is Twitter–the minimalist’s version of a profile, with all the self-absorption of uploading a photo album. Now, we can have a profile, or at least a bit of one, and we can write about what is doing on with our lives, like “eatin’ dinner” or cryptically quote a song that we think speaks to us at that particular moment in time.

But unlike the rest of social media, Twitter is already out there in the mainstream. Older folks, even big corporations and presidential campaigns, are using it to get out their message to people, because they aren’t really sure what this thing is all about yet. We can follow what’s going on with our local bus route or get the latest headlines from our favorite local news station! Best of all, we can create fake profiles of our favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation characters and follow them when the service is actually working. But if it’s already uncool, how can it ever get more popular?

Because our need for obsession is moving faster all the time. We need a new object to fix ourselves upon. We need a new frontier to set up shop and feel important. The cycle is just getting so ferocious that it’s skipping over itself. Twitter is going to fly out of control like a broken ride at the state fair. And then that happens, it’s only a matter of time before you get freshly chewed-fried dough launched unto your shirt from some other car.