Social Who?!

A couple of weeks back, Spence was chuntering on about some application that he’d added on Facebook that he was having a laugh with. It’s called “Social Me” and the premise is very simple. You click through a series of photos of other Social Me users, and next to each photo there are a series of “Tags” which you choose one of to click on that you think best represents this person: examples include “Pretty”, “Sweet”, “Cool”, “Rediculous”, “Cheeky” and so on. Some are nice. Some are not. There’s also a form box that you can fill in for a custom tag if you prefer. As well as showing a picture, you can also upload More Pics, or write an About Me, so if creative people want to do a custom tag that’s not just based on your looks or one pic, then they can get a bit more info about you in order to do so. It’s quite a lot of fun, seeing what people can come up with.

You can filter people in a few ways. The first is simple: Male/Female/Both lets you pick which gender you’d like to look at. Since there is a “Flirt” button and an “I am interested in ...” button, this opens up “dating” (lol) possibilities. The second is more by area: My Friends/Network/Country/Everyone. So if you want to scout out “hot British chicks” you could do, for example.

Now I like this kind of thing, and get easily addicted to them. I like paying people compliments, as well as calling people silly things. It’s a character flaw. So I’ve been playing with it quite a lot, and made a few new friends in the bargain, which is always nice.

However, I began to notice a bizarre trend. Underneath your picture on the main Social Me page, you can set a headline. I tend to use mine for quoting silly things, or making witty and ironic statements about myself with my typical self-deprecating wit. However, I noticed that a lot of girls were writing “Please, no more sexy or drunk or happy or nice tits or fuckable tags please”, and the irony of this just shouted at me. See, a lot of the girls that had set this kind of comment were either smiling at the camera (“Happy”), holding a bottle of booze (“Drunk”), in a bikini (“Sexy”), taking the shot straight down their cleavage (“Nice tits”), or in more elaborate states of undress (“Fuckable”), and it occurred to me: do they not THINK that the subject matter of their photo might be inspiring particular comments about them?! Most people aren’t going to read the About Me for each person. They’re gonna focus in on a huge pair of boobs in a lacy bra and say the first thing that comes into their head, protected by the safety and anonymity of the internet. Duh!

So I changed my headline to something along the following lines: “~If you have a problem with people saying you're Hot or Sexy or Happy or Fuckable or whatever, think what it is about your photo that might lead someone to say that!~”

Fair enough, I thought. Consider it satire, if you will. And if I’m honest, I got a lot of people using the Send Note function to send me little notes about this. It inspired a fair amount of conversation between myself and various people I’d not met before. I was quite chuffed about the whole thing.

Until one person sent me the following note:

“I dont actualy have a problem with any of the above! wots your problem??”

Now I’m not generally an antagonistic person, but that riled me. Had she completely misunderstood the point I was trying to make? I felt I should at least reply to try and explain what I’d meant, just in case I’d come across as an ass. So I wrote the following reply:

“Good for you; I don't either!

I just find it amusing when people with no About Me written moan on their headlines for Social Me-ers to stop tagging them as Happy or Hot when all their photo has is a them smiling or showing their breasts. What do they THINK people are gonna say?!

I'm just being satirical. I'm allowed. It's part of my job :)”

Bit of humour, I thought, would lighten up the mood. Politeness goes a long way. Figured that was self-explanatory enough... right?!

She replied again:

“you know wot i find amusin?? ppl like you!! take your full of small minded shity attitude somewhere else pleas now, iv laughted 4 long enuf”

I chuckled at this on several levels. First of all her spelling is fucking atrocious, and while online I know the rules of grammar, punctuation and spelling are relaxed – hell, I’m lazy when I type too – the amount of effort put into this was great! Now I know I should take my “full of small minded shity attitude” somewhere else. Full of small minded. What the hell?! Either way, it was another insult, and since I was in a conflictory mood, I decided to send her another reply, just to prove how much of a jerk I was, and how right she was. Etc etc:

“Obviously you didn't get the joke. Never mind :)

And if I was small-minded I wouldn't have been able to see the irony in your words:

At the end of the day, I wasn't insulting anyone - except you obviously. I was simply pointing out that people expect too much creativity and imagination from the world at large. Okay, so YOU don't have a problem with people calling you HOT etc etc. That's fine. But I've seen a lot of people who DO moan. I was just pointing out that maybe it's the way that they've presented themselves on the application that provokes such a response.

It's interesting actually though. You're the first person in two days who has actually whined and moaned about my comment. Lots of people seem to agree with me.

But nevermind eh! You go reassess your poorly-spelt insulting attitude, and I'll go reassess the reasons why I'm even bothering to try and be polite. :)”

As you can see, I DID try and be polite and congenial, but she did rub me up the wrong way so I figured I’d have a dig at her. She’s the ONLY person, still, to have made a negative comment about that quote. I’ve actually just put it back on, to see if it inspires any more commentary over the next few hours. Maybe I’ll be able to write an addendum to the blog.

Anyways, if you’re on Facebook, check Social Me out. It’s good for a laugh!