The Social Space Station

Here’s an interesting piece at the BBC about online friends. The crux of the story is that busy business folk wanting to maintain high social networking activity pay other people to do their dirty work - blogging, comments, adding friends, responding and so on. Thereby creating the impression that they are really efficient people that can seemingly do everything.

This is on the back of a story on the current affairs show 60 Minutes (on TV3 in New Zealand) called ‘Web of Deceit’.

This story concerned teenage girls forming apparent relationships with their ideal boyfriends online, only to find they were fake. Nevermind that they never met in person, the relationships formed at this young impressionable age were as real to these girls as if it were a real person. It is a shame then, that the supposed boys were created by other girls at the same school or at least known to the victims.

In both cases, a lot of effort as gone into substantiating, for all intensive purposes, fake identities. In one case, the front person is real but is not responsible for the content and in the other, the person and content is entirely fictional.

Disturbingly in the latter example, the persona’s were devised entirely to torture the gullible victims. The consequences of this was an attempted suicide.

These stories do not say anything new about the human condition or illustrate what is wrong with the Internet, they simply reinforce the reality of the world we live in.

Ironic then that the activities are conducted in virtual space.