November 7, 2007
The Internet has long been a blessing for creeps and stalkers the world over and arguably the greatest gift it has given them has been Facebook, which is at the forefront of “social-networking sites” (anti-social networking having fallen off the typical MBA syllabus in the mid-80s). Facebook, in which Microsoft recently invested millions (a move that this Guardian columnist puts somewhere on the level of going to the racetrack and betting on the horse with the nicest eyes), allows you to stalk comfortably from your home, without having to jump into a thorn-filled bush to avoid being spotted, or ruining your favorite slacks by getting garbage-juice on them whilst sifting through the neighbor’s green bin.
Information that in years past would have required a private detective of Magnum PI-like skills to unearth is now visible to all of a person’s most far-fetched connections (at least those who haven’t been relegated to the shameful “limited-profile” status). While you might have one day expected to cross paths with that guy in elementary school who beat you up because you carried a briefcase to school, you would likely have expected this chance meeting to occur while he was pumping your gas and you were wild-eyed and chain-smoking – not via a Facebook message in which he reminisces on your school days as “such a larf!”.
Despite the privacy concerns it raises, and the doors to one’s troubled past it opens, Facebook has become hugely popular and most users do not fret a bit about keeping their Facebook fold informed of the yawning minutiae of their daily lives – events that, in the past, it would have seemed exceedingly arrogant to detail in a greeting card.
The UK newspaper The Daily Mail recently ran a finger-wagging piece on one group of Facebook members who truly could not give less of a sh*te about traditional public/private boundaries called 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night – 80 reasons fewer than the 110 signposts offered by the tour guides for the recreationally drunk, The Shark Guys, in the seminal “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery”. (All the reasons referred to in the group’s name, including “You find yourself peeing behind random buildings”, can be found here). Postings from this group comprise in part pics of women on the back-end of benders, passed out, exposing themselves, falling into bushes, or, in other words, behaving like 90% of the men their age who go out on Saturday nights.
The Daily Mail’s story, the word count of which seems to have been padded by the headline “The ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics on Facebook”, achieves a tabloid double-whammy both by striking a conservative pose and churlishly criticizing these girls’ drunken antics, while at the same time finding an excuse to run large photos of young women with knickers in plain sight (the two we’ve run here being preferable in case nosy-bastard coworkers are a problem where you are).
We speak from experience when we say that journalism is largely the domain of those whose first choice of job, professional alcoholic, was unavailable, and as such we’re guessing that the latter reason – Rule 141 of the Tabloid Handbook: When in doubt, think “Girls Gone Wild” and work from there – factored far more heavily into the decision to run the story. (Click here for full article)
The Shark Guys
