The Charade mix their third album Keeping Up Appearances. Meanwhile the world is falling apart. The most tiresome question for a while must be do you have Facebook?
Some people are not capable to communicate in the usual way with cell phone and email anymore. The epidemic known as Facebook is both the virus, the symptoms and the disease at the same time. On the other hand, Facebook is only a little child of its time that has grown too big too fast.
The first episode of the Swedish TV show Survivor (the Swedish version was called Expedition Robinson) aired in 1997, a few years after the Internet breakthrough. Of course, Survivor itself was never the great change. Survivor was just a TV show concept that aired at the right time and thus only serves as an example in this case. Sadly, the entire Survivor concept (at least in the Swedish version) was based on the not very appealing character trait of sacrificing someone else for your own benefit. More importantly, Survivor started a trend where the boundary between the private and the public loosened up.
Ten years later, we see the full effects. After Myspace, it was only a matter of time until someone else would take the concept further. A community has major flaws when it is the rule rather than the exception to have hundreds of friends. Allow me to raise a rhetorical question - who does have 735 friends?
In December last year I got an offer to be captured, if only for a moment, by the media world. The weekly young adult entertainment guide Dygnet Runt (in fact a Friday appendix produced by the newspaper Sydsvenskan) had sent an invitation to their photocall for people who "in the past year have made Malmö and Lund a little better, a little better looking and more fun to be in". One day I unexpectedly found such an invitation in my mailbox. I obviously got the invitation because I was the promoter at Blekingska's indie pop club Indigo last autumn. I stayed at home instead of going to a group photo that would reach hundreds of thousands readers. I can not say that the idea of mingling with the region's entertainment elite attracted me. Once I later got the newspaper in my hand, I noticed that 114 people had come to the photocall. The title was "The Chosen People". Either you are with us or not. Trendy or not trendy. It reminded me of my very early shool years and class mates who said "you are invited, you are also invited, but you may not come". I was very pleased with my decision to not go to the photocall when I saw that a number of media horny and incredibly annoying Nöjesguiden (another young adult entertainment guide) profiles were on the same group picture that I would had been if I said yes.
However, the purpose of this post is not to picture myself as conceited. It is rather a desperate cry for help, hoping to avoid hearing well we set up something, what is your facebook?
Until then, I listen to The Charade's new song The World Is Going Under which is a gem among all the pigs who are taking themselves too seriously while thinking they are the middle point of earth.
