A cunt, yesterday
So Facebook can be added to the ever-lengthening list of things that are destroying the fabric of our society (along with overpaid footballers, fast cars, drink, gambling, short skirts, gays, immigrants, hamburgers, factories and so on and so forth) according to another dude in a dress. In a wide-ranging and generally incoherent set of ramblings about things he pretty much doesn’t understand beyond the general impression he’s picked up from whatever rag he reads when he’s not comdemning us all to Purgatory, His Sainted Reverence, Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Holy Rollers, Defender of Truth, Pilgrim Of the Ages and General Vicar of Dibley declaims:
“I think there’s a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.”
Say what? You mean the more ways we have to communicate the worse our communication becomes? To quote 1950s sci-fi robots: this does not compute. Technology is merely a conduit. It’s like criticising letters. Or the phone. Or smoke signals. This clown can’t see that, if anything, it vastly increases personal connections. If you’re a cripplingly shy, housebound, jobless freak you don’t have to face up to a roomful of strangers to strike up a conversation. Trapped in your room, you can find an identity you could never manage in the ‘real world’. For every suicide that Facebook has “caused”, I’d wager a thousand lives have been saved.
I, like a lot of people, have a vast sprawling network of people I call ‘friends’ – some of whom I’ve never even met and others I haven’t seen in the flesh for decades. My sisters live in Surrey and Liverpool respectively and thanks to the evils of phones, the internet, emails and more I can speak to them at any time of night or day – knowing that my message will reach them for them to respond to at their leisure. I have friends that fulfil particular needs (no sniggering). Some of them are sounding boards for my problems. Others are people I can have a laugh with or, shit, argue theology. Then there are some cunts I’ve got on ‘ignore/block’ because I’ve decided I don’t want them stepping around my life.
The real problem, I suspect, that His Very Holiness has is that the hugely improved network of human contacts that the internet has made possible has made his centralised, hierarchical Here Is The Law By Which Thou Shall Liveth schtick even less relevant than it already was. When people used to quest for meaning, they might turn to a guy in a pulpit because seriously where else would you go? But now you’re free to find out about other alternatives. Maybe salvation doesn’t lie in a World of Warcraft messageboard for everyone, but for someone out there it serious does. You want to swap that for your homogenised vision of what “society” should be? Well I fucking don’t. You’re still fulminating about the gays about 3 decades after everyone else decided that a little light crossdressing and bumsex on a weekend was OK if that’s your scene.
Churches, Governments and Media alike are discovering that we can’t be coralled into their little pigeon holes any more. We won’t all be starting nuclear families or washing the car on Sunday. Some of us will slavishly follow Madonna down every faddish religious road she follows. Some of us will commit suicide over MySpace bullying. Some of us will save someone from doing exactly that.
So you know what, your Holiness? Go fuck yourself. It will make a change from fucking children, lest we forget.
[EDIT: this just in from our irony department: God's Representative on Earth has a Facebook group. Sweet!]