Social Media Mini Series: Annoying Acronyms and Tiresome Trends

80% of the population now use social networking, coincidentally I think it’s a fairly accurate estimate that 80% of all people are fucking stupid. This produces an interesting correlation which means Facebook (the idiot’s social network of choice) is increasingly becoming polluted with the worthless drawl that is somehow generated by the neutron-sized minds of these air-headed dullards. Social networking should be about meaningful interaction – lively banter and the sharing of relevant, exciting content. Instead, having endeared itself to the everyman, the worlds most popular website is now a breeding ground for venomous bitching, mis-spelled inconsequential status updates and, lord give me strength, Farmville invites.

My contempt for the people that produce this ‘pseudo content’ is almost beyond my powers of articulation, but I’ll give it a try. First of all, let’s start with Farmville, which is essentially Sim City for thick tossers and single mums, the people that spend hours buying virtual cows and building fences are the very type that used to ridicule what they called ‘geeks’ for investing time in emotionally charged, critically acclaimed gaming goodness. Well look how the tables have turned, you lot now spend your evenings peering over your five chins at your Netbook screen with Emmerdale on in the background, planting flowers and letting the world know about it – ‘PLayin farmvill LOL’ (sic). I’d much rather be a geek thanks.

Perhaps worse is the grammatical train-wreck that is the to-and-fro of insidious bitchy comments between a couple of uneducated council-flat dwellers, or the cringeworthy advances of a desperate young buck trying in vain to snare a ‘500 friend’ beauty. It wouldn’t be so bad if this shit wasn’t splattered all over the news-feed like diarrhea from the proverbial anus of homogenous mass culture, but good networkers are being denied the opportunity to pick up on decent content as it gets bumped down the feed by this waste.

At this point the few people who will actually read this will most likely be thinking, ‘what the fuck are you rambling on about?’ Let me break things down with a list, everyone likes a list. Here are some acronyms and trends circulating on the ubiquitous book of faces:

‘FAIL’ – The pasting of this word as a suffix for any mildly negative status update has become commonplace. First born out of the highly entertaining fail blog, essentially the web’s answer to ‘You’ve Been Framed’, the term has grown in usage; originally cheeky and amusing to those ‘in the loop’, it has now become overused in inappropriate contexts.

e.g. – late for work – career fail!

That’s neither unique or funny – fail fail!

‘Sleeps’ – As in ‘2 more sleeps until holiday’ Why not say ‘2 more days’? When the fuck did the word ‘sleep’ replace the word ‘day’ and why didn’t anyone tell me?

‘MUCH!?’- As in ‘jealous? – MUCH!’ For the uninitiated that roughly translates into plain English as, ‘yes, I’m green with envy’, so why not just say that. It might even be classified as ironic if you were to say ‘Jealous? – NOT MUCH!’. ‘Much’ on its own however means nothing, just like the existence of people that vomit this shit all over their networks.

‘FML‘ – This is a fairly new one which I must say I have a soft spot for, perhaps because it’s so needlessly melodramatic. Again uprooted  a popular blog, ‘Fuck My Life’, this can be used singularly as a status or tweet, or in the same format as the aforementioned ‘FAIL’. Of course anyone lucky enough to live in the western world and have access to a computer and the web should by no means be uttering this which makes it all the more amusing when it appears in updates such as:

‘Long queue for the iPhone 4 – FML!’

So there we have it, a few of the key terms in circulation today amongst the Facebook twatterarti. If you got to this point in my rant I’m sure you feel my pain, anyone who actually  uses these probably will have got confused or offended and given up. To remedy this problem I think Facebook users should have to pass a compulsory IQ test before being able to access the network, of course if this were the case it wouldn’t have reached the level of success it has today. Perhaps then, a new breakaway network for the non-idiots. Twitter, anyone?