Here’s One for All the New Media Douchebags in the House.

August 7th, 2008, by The Angry Drunk

So, I’m sit­ting here in my office, work­ing dili­gently (seri­ously, for any poten­tial employ­ers out there, I’m work­ing my ass off). I’m also see­ing tweets fly by, and read­ing blog posts by Robert “I have more fol­low­ers that God (lit­er­ally, 31,617 vs 600 as of this post­ing)” Scoble shilling the lat­est New Media Douchebag Approved™ social blog­ging net­work what­ever. Meanwhile, over in my email client a funny thing is hap­pen­ing. People I know, peo­ple I would even go so far as to call friends are email­ing back and forth, plan­ning a happy hour gath­er­ing for tomor­row (and inci­den­tally accus­ing each other of being either hip­pies or red-necks).

Email! I know, it’s fuck­ing shock­ing. I mean, it’s so 1990’s. No Loopt, no Twitter, not even a dynamic group blog lever­ag­ing social net­works. Fucking email. Even worse, and I’m embar­rassed to admit this, some of us will actu­ally tele­phone peo­ple not on the mail­ing list to give them the heads up.  We may even use landlines.

The point behind the snark here? This is what actual friends do; and this is the point that the New Media Douchebags fail to miss. Things like Twitter, and MySpace, and blogs, and Loopt are there to enhance the social expe­ri­ence, not replace it.  People make “social” net­works; not technology.

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  • http://ripragged.blogspot.com Anonymous

    Oh, man. NOW you’re start­ing to piss me off. Next thing you know you’ll be telling every­one that you go out­side dur­ing the day and TALK to actual people.

    I really thought you were going to keep this plau­si­ble. You can’t talk to any­one. I mean, there is no life except for the per­son who is your “num­ber one” friend this week.

    Dammit. This is 2008.

  • http://rip-ragged.com/dross Rip Ragged

    Oh, man. NOW you’re start­ing to piss me off. Next thing you know you’ll be telling every­one that you go out­side dur­ing the day and TALK to actual people.

    I really thought you were going to keep this plau­si­ble. You can’t talk to any­one. I mean, there is no life except for the per­son who is your “num­ber one” friend this week.

    Dammit. This is 2008.

  • http://ripragged.blogspot.com Anonymous

    You look lonely. My daughter’s wed­ding was today. I don’t have any pho­tos yet. My iPhone was the music source. The Flash Gordon sound­track ver­sion of The Wedding March was the accom­pa­ni­ment I walked her down the aisle.

    Many friends of the groom were there; very few fam­ily and friends of the bride. Her own mother couldn’t man­age to make it. I wasn’t sur­prised. She’s a bitch. That’s why I divorced her 30 years ago.

    The bad thing is that I have 10 or so gal­lons of micro­brew IPA left over and no one to help me drink it. If you pop up this way in the next day or two, I’ll share.

    Wifey-poo saved enough left­overs from the recep­tion that we can eat like deca­dent kings, and drink like home­less lot­tery winners.

    Come on up.

    Rip

  • http://rip-ragged.com/dross Rip Ragged

    You look lonely. My daughter’s wed­ding was today. I don’t have any pho­tos yet. My iPhone was the music source. The Flash Gordon sound­track ver­sion of The Wedding March was the accom­pa­ni­ment I walked her down the aisle.

    Many friends of the groom were there; very few fam­ily and friends of the bride. Her own mother couldn’t man­age to make it. I wasn’t sur­prised. She’s a bitch. That’s why I divorced her 30 years ago.

    The bad thing is that I have 10 or so gal­lons of micro­brew IPA left over and no one to help me drink it. If you pop up this way in the next day or two, I’ll share.

    Wifey-poo saved enough left­overs from the recep­tion that we can eat like deca­dent kings, and drink like home­less lot­tery winners.

    Come on up.

    Rip

  • http://regjeringa.blogspot.com Bjørn

    Ho my God and let him bless Allah. And here I was think­ing that Facebook was a tool that would let me live my life with­out hav­ing to actu­ally meet some­one. Does this mean I have to turn my phone off flight mode? Aren’t all par­ties vir­tual? And why haven’t any­one sol­dered up a wlan card that can be directly con­nected to the brain? Imagine just think­ing “www​.beer​-down​load​.org”; and 3 gal­lons of vir­tual beer would be instantly deliv­ered to your blood­stream, mak­ing all the pains of the rain­in­fested phys­i­cal world go away. Although I doubt this would be a good thing in the long run, since the taste of beer would be lost. Unless there is a script one can run that would make the taste­buds force-quit and reboot in an eter­nal beer-tasting frenzy. Ish. I hate Sundays.

  • http://regjeringa.blogspot.com Bjørn

    Ho my God and let him bless Allah. And here I was think­ing that Facebook was a tool that would let me live my life with­out hav­ing to actu­ally meet some­one. Does this mean I have to turn my phone off flight mode? Aren’t all par­ties vir­tual? And why haven’t any­one sol­dered up a wlan card that can be directly con­nected to the brain? Imagine just think­ing “www​.beer​-down​load​.org”; and 3 gal­lons of vir­tual beer would be instantly deliv­ered to your blood­stream, mak­ing all the pains of the rain­in­fested phys­i­cal world go away. Although I doubt this would be a good thing in the long run, since the taste of beer would be lost. Unless there is a script one can run that would make the taste­buds force-quit and reboot in an eter­nal beer-tasting frenzy. Ish. I hate Sundays.

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