Why I'm deleting my Facebook account

I’ve always been an enthusiastic proponent of social media, I had a MySpace page before anyone I know. I looked with disdain on Bebo as positively amateur but was an early Facebook user. Now Ive had to watch as the post Bebo generation have infected a perfectly adequate platform with horoscopes and hangover updates. I’ve face palmed when ‘I love the cock’ gets 300 ‘likes’ but ‘I’m feeling pretty low today’ gets no reaction in friends, acquaintances and randomers updates.
I have defected to twitter, which seems to encompass all the people I want to be my friends without the creepiness of trawling through their unprotected photographs on Facebook. I meet minds, I ignore, I have no fear of recrimination or insult, I will not be tagged with a double chin….. perhaps if I want to find out what friends are doing I will hence forth call them.

There are a number of key annoyances in the land of Facebook, firstly,
Apps.
Apple did something right when it chose to filter apps for iphone, and while my open source heart breaks to admit it, its time to put a clamp down on half the garbage that ends up in my timeline. I block and block, but for each one I chop down 2 spring up in its place. I sometimes wish there was an 'idiocyfree' button I could click to remove all horoscope/celebrity/I dont know how he survived THIS-click like to see' pages from my life permanantly.

Secondly Adverts

No matter how many times I inform Facebook that an advert is offensive (they all are, I didn’t come here to buy anything) they continue to replace them, it would appear as though feedback is not listened to, and god damn it, I want to be listened to. Every other page is populated with adverts and frankly Facebook, I don’t need a fucking bra for a backless dress today, thanks (I just checked my profile to give you an honest answer and that’s what they ‘targeted’ me as needing)

Gatekeepers
Perhaps I’m not as much of a leftie liberal as Id like to believe, but allowing pages to go up unfiltered such as in the ‘Raoul Moate is a legend’ case but censoring pictures of women breastfeeding is a tad skewed in my thinking. Filtering any mention of sex but allowing hate groups to put pages together to bash gays, muslims and minorities seems to me to be a bizarre criteria for inclusion in the Facebook universe.

Kids
If another U13 year old child of a friend sends me a request I am highly likely to loose my mind. Not only am I bothered that parents will allow unsupervised access to the social media for primary school children, Im peeved that they think Im a suitable ‘friend’ candidate (I must be going soft) I don’t want to filter my status or worry about the suitability of my posts, I do not want people to access my friends list and find the kiddies on there. I do want Facebook to engage in more rigorous age verification techniques. When it started out it was most definitely a grown ups forum, now its Bebo on steroids.

Etiquette
The final straw came this week, I turned 35 (I’m admitting it, I will revert to 32 in about a week) a pretty big occasion in my humble estimation. The 'divisible by 5’s' are the unit to go by past 21. I got the obligatory Happy Birthday wishes from many people, very nice, very nice, but there are limits to this.
1: If you are a close friend/family and have somebody’s phone number a call or text is polite on a birthday
2: For people who wouldn’t talk regularly or have a close relationship, through distance or other reasons a message through Facebook is fine.
3: If you are MY ONLY BROTHER AND CLOSEST SIBLING a fucking wall post on my birthday doesn’t cut it… even my 2 sisters managed the monumental task of sending a text message.

And this is the proverbial straw, I have become so distanced from others, even my family that they consider a wall post an effective means to communicate with me on an important occasion, there is simply no choice left but to abandon it.

Hausfrau of the Year

I felt the well of creativity bubbling over last night when a twitter storm erupted over the annual Rose of Tralee frocks and personality vacuums. Not content to sit on the sidelines,being TV-less and unable to join in the collective slagging and begrudgery that such a spectacular evokes, I thought back to my childhood and the wonder that was the Calor Kosangas Housewife of the Year.

I cannot remember the Rose of Tralee being part of yearly life but I certainly recall my mothers hushing for the Calor Spectacular. I have vague recollections of nice frocks and ample buxom, the result of too many queen cakes, children and an ill fitted bra. The chortles and bingo wings, all vying for the golden toilet brush or whatever nonsense passed for a prize in those days. This was after all the era of blankety blank, where contestants sold their souls for a sprayed gold checkbook that connected to no checking account. Tweeter Orlaith Finnegan reminded me that there were speed cake icing and bed dressing rounds. This is perhaps where my mothers obsession with hospital corners on bed sheets originated. None the less the thought of frenzied housewifery had me in tears last night. But what would todays CKHY contestants have to demonstrate?

Its all about the host, you have to put the ladies at ease, a sort of horsewhisperer for housewives. Suggestions so far have included Eddie Hobbs, Gaybo, Tubridy all of which amount to just another Autumn schedule in RTE. Kudos to the tweeter that suggested Ivor Callely, but that level of permatan is likely to spook the hors..housewives. His fellow Senator and all round lovely bottom Ronan Mullens would make a fine host. He could have them eating out of his bag of oats with a gentle coo of residual catholic guilt, and fire them up for the ‘dirty look at the non catholics round’

Yes, indeed, what would we test these new age housewives on?

Complaint call to customer support in India round, where housewives battle through thick regional accents to solve their home broadband problems in as short a time as possible.

Baking at the office, where thoroughly modern housewives use their feet to blend and knead delicious cakes under desks ready for the oven upon arrival home.

The nipple stretch, where housewives see how far a breastpump can stretch their nipples in preparation for returning to work immediately after the birth of children.

The one hundred meter dash, restoring a minimalist home to its uncluttered finish with a child attached to each limb.

Full make up application and hair styling while making sandwiches and driving kids to school, this round also has the added challenge of avoiding the Gardai.

Feel free to add your own to the #CKHY stream on twitter or comment below

To hell or to Carrickstown

I’m turning into a twitter addict, its like all the witty people I ever wanted to hang out with when sober distilled into my pocket. The only thing I despair of is the nightly discussions of shows on TV, for the most part I can slag along, because I know exactly who these people are, despite the fact that I have not seen any of these shows. It doesn’t take much talent, just a matter of recalling whoever was on RTE five, ten, fifteen years ago and making some witty comment. When I hear of the massive figures paid to Pat Kenny in RTE I don’t despair of missing whatever they have to offer me by way of entertainment. They cling to nostalgia like a favourite childhood toy, where is the hope of anything innovative, fresh or new coming to a TV screen near you, when the same old thing gets trotted out again and again?

I disconnected the Sky about 2 years ago, not bothered to revert to RTE. I do have a TV in the house, but watch no TV, I have alternatives that fulfil our entertainment needs, we don’t need 60 channels to watch what we want to watch, we don’t even need to tune the set. The Xbox and a USB is all I need to watch high definition, advert free programmes whenever I want. I’ve been online since 1993, I had my first webpage up within 3 months of starting Computer Applications in DCU that year. While I never had much grá for architecture or code, I did love the web; it was a playground. Things were different back then, everything was shared, the internet was a mess, but a wondrous mess, where you had to know or guess the location of stuff and sponsorship, smiley faces and cookies were a gleam in a programmers eye. I’ve played games since getting hooked on Doom in college and still feel a tingle when I hear the noises from Super Mario Bros. With 40% of US gamers now women, Im hapy to welcome the rest of the girls to the fun.

The early days of the internet were the birthplace of ideas, open source and these values continue today, albeit with increasing pressure from large multinationals to create a monetised internet where you get, but only if you pay for it. Anyone that has used Google images for the past number of years will note the decreasing ammount of images available. There are ways around this problem, like all other obstacles put in the way of users, hackers and geeks have refused to be bowed by barriers. As quickly as code to protect material can be written, somebody is working for FREE to break it. Where and how do these freedom fighters fit in with the Capitalist ethos that now threatens the internet? We, hackers, pirates and open source geeks are the new rebel scum for the interweb overlords to shake angry gloved fists at.

We share the shows we want to watch, with no ad breaks and sponsors messages. We are tuned in, but we have chosen another way of experiencing cultural artefacts. The TV goes on, the show is watched and the TV goes off, we are no longer slaves to the remote, because we have escaped, we have taken the blue pill. On the high seas of P2P, we share with others freely, we support the networked users, we are never leeches. The powers that be want this to be termed stealing but I don’t and wont see it that way, am I stealing if I go to a friends house to watch it on ‘the channels’ without making some sort of monetary donation to the host? The same tired rhetoric of ‘sharing is stealing’ gets trotted out time and time again. If I steal something then I have taken the original, if I copy it the original remains. There is a difference...

For those of you still struggling to get past Eircoms laughably weak attempt at censorship I say get thee to hidemyass.com or take my route to the stars straight through the Bays' own proxy server, because what you do on the internet is your business not IRMA's. https://www.ipredator.se/

Image above courtesy of http://morrigan-reborn.blogspot.com/2009/11/jack-o-connor-hurts-pat-kennys-feefees.html check her out!