we are all born mad. some remain so.

I forgot to add in my previous post another resolution:

10.Try my best to be punctual!

I'm damn proud to say that I've successfully posted a second post! Great start to keeping my resolutions!

For those who've noticed the facebook... DON'T WORRY! nothing happened! It's just that my sis and bro are trying to add me to facebook and they don't know about it yet so I remove it first ma. Will put it back soon!

Speaking of facebook, I came across this article by Joel Stein of Times about facebook, it's really funny, take some time to read it if you're interested:

"You are not my friend- Yes we're on Facebook. But I don't care about your cat. And stop poking me" by Joel Stein

In the pre-internet days, neither of us would have even thought of calling each other friends. We'd have called ourselves friends of friends who met once once and yet, for some reason, kept sending each other grammatically challenged, inappropriately flirty letters with photos of ourselves attached. Police might have gotten involved.

But now we're definitely friends, having taken a public vow of friendship on friend-based websites, wearing a metaphorical friendship bracelets on the earnest Facebook, the punky MySpace, the careerist LinkedIn and the suddenly very Asian Friendster. As if that weren't enough friendship for you, some of you have also asked me to be friends on the nerdy Twitter, the dorky-elitist Doostang and the Eurotrashy hi5. You message me and comment about me and write on my walls and dedicate songs to me and invite me to join groups. More than once you have taken it upon yourself to poke me.

This is hard to say to a friend, but our relationship is starting to take up too much of my time. It's weird that I know more about you than I do about actual friends I hang out with in person- whom I propose we distinguish by calling "non-metafriends". In fact, I know more about you than I know about myself. I have no idea what my favourite movie or song or TV show is. Last I checked, they all involved Muppets.

Also, you're abit aggressive in our friendship. Would a non-metafriend call me up and say "Hey! Guess what? I have a bunch of new pictures of me"? Or tell me he'd coloured in a map of all the places he'd ever been? Or inform me, as Michael Hirschorn did in his Facebook status update, that he is "not making decisions; he's making surprises"? It's as if I suddenly met a new group of people who were all in the special classes.

The horror is, I can't opt out. Just as I can't stop making money or my non-metafriends will have more stuff than I do, I can't stop running up my tally of MySpace friends or I'll look like a loser. Just as money made wealth quantifiable, social networks have provided a metric for popularity. We all, oddly, slot in at a specific ranking somewhere below Dane Cook.

I'm sure social networks serve many important functions that improve our lives, like reconnecting us with old friends and finding out if people we used to date are still good-looking. And social networks all have messaging functions, which would be an excellent way to send information if no one have invented email.

But really, these sites aren't about connecting and reconnecting. They're a platform for self-branding. Old people are always worrying that our blogging and personal websites and MySpace profiles are taking away our privacy, but they clearly don't understand the word privacy. We're not sharing things we don't want people to know. We're showing you our best posed, retouched photos. We're listing the Pynchon books we want you to think we've read all the way through. We're allowing other people to write whatever they want about us on our walls, unless we don't like it, in which case we just erase it. If we had that much privacy in real life, the bathrooms at that Minnesota airport would be empty.

And like the abrasively direct ads for tinctures and cleaning products at the beginning of the advertising age, our self-branding is none to subtle. We are a blunt lot, in our bikinis and our demands that our friends go right now to check out our blog postings. We've gone 40 years back, to sales tactics predating irony, self-deprecation and actual modesty. We are, as a social network, all so awesome that we will soon not be able to type the Number 1, because we would have worn out the exclamation point that shares its key.