大象传媒

Ryan logs in

Building a wall and laying a post

It's happened and now it's unavoidable. I've been stupid enough to give my details, build my wall and sign up to what people are calling a 'social network'. I purposely avoided it for so many years because I knew what it would start. And now, all because I wanted to join my fellow Blast-afarians online, I have become a fresh flake on the growing snowball that is Facebook.听

It began with just one friend request and from there it's spiralled out of control. It's not Facebook anymore but, more aptly named, Tracebook in my case. With each new friend gained I spend hours searching for other people I may know. It's not that I send friend requests to all of the old acquaintances I find. I'll often just sit and stare at their tiny photos.

I doubt I'm the only one who rejoices in reading small amounts of information about people I barely knew in real life. Or staring at photos of people longer than I looked at their actual face. This is a whole new world of interaction but, apart from the obvious differences between Facebook and the real world, the two share many similarities.听

The pics

You must have a good picture on your profile, trust me, I have noted this from hours spent looking at them. These pictures can be placed in a number of different groups but every photo is used to express identity in some way. You have the 'I'm still cool' pictures in which the cool kids from school stand next to huge cars or high performance power bikes, superimposed in Photoshop. There's the 'look how I blossomed' pictures, my personal favourites, the ones that leave you wishing you had been nicer to the geeky, more quiet girls at school. Moving from my favourite to worst there's the 'I had a professional' picture. I don't like these because the 'I had a professional' picture always gets you in the best artificial light and this is not true to life. I could go on with this list, the 'look at my new muscles' pictures, the 'I'm now in a serious relationship' snaps, and the often reassuring 'I'm still the same' pictures.听

A lot can be read from a picture, someone once told me about a thousand words. When you get access to an entire profile containing photo galleries, blogs and a variety of personal information, Facebook can be just like meeting a person in the street. This is a sure sign of post-modernism, where an attachment to hyper-reality is as credible as personal involvement in the real world. It's this that's got me worried.听

Hyper-reality

I am worried about the increasing number of people who 'live' online and I feel that I have been sucked into the binary net. Trapped in a world of profile-edits and new photo uploads. Unlike the real world, you can create a sub personality, a new identity and one better than your own. It's this that attracts people. We live in increasingly voyeuristic times and websites like Facebook only encourage this. My friend posted a comment on his wall recently that read: "I'm sat here wondering, if I delete my profile, do I cease to exist".

Adoption

Lots of you will already know that through my work at the 大象传媒 I have taken on many unforeseen responsibilities. The biggest of these has been my recent adoption of a mealworm. For those that don't know the tale, I met an eco artist and he asked me to adopt one. Simple!

Ryan's little worm

I have checked on my little fella everyday and fed him on a rich diet of bran flakes but so far I feel like I got the raw end of the deal. He does nothing all day, just roams around molting, waiting to become a beetle and at the moment I'm getting a little upset about it. I had big plans, some sort of insect circus with a beetle ringmaster, but at the current rate I just can't see how that's going to happen.听

I'm up all night checking he's still breathing and that is a hard thing to do with a mealworm. He sometimes plays dead and I'm sure he does it just to wind me up. I understand fatherhood isn't easy but at the moment it's just all take, no give. He has grown a little but I can't credit him for it, that's just natural. I was looking on the web for information regarding fostering the little fella when my dad gave me some advice. He said for the first few years of my life I had been a lot like the mealworm. I'd sat around doing nothing, requiring lots of attention for little reward. Then my dad paused, looked at me and said: "Come to think of it, nothing has changed'.

After my dad made this stark similarity between myself and the mealworm, I have decided to give this fatherhood lark another go. I look forward to my mealworm growing up into a big, strong beetle and promise to keep you all posted on his developments, if there are any.听听听