Newspeak Hits Social Networks

Not only in the light of the forthcoming election does my future government want to turn me into metadata but now Facebook wants to do that too...



The social networking site has this morning decided to eradicate individual 'blog like' writing on the info pages of their users meaning that individuality in it's electronic form has completely changed. Currently I believe this is only a revolution but not an evolution as my newly 'listed' life on my info page has now been made up of nutritious tags which I may tick or select like ones and zeros. Needless to say I'm doing 25% of the things I was doing last week, like 10% of the books I liked last week and have been left with pretty much no interests whatsoever. Now I may produce tags for a computer to understand who I am like an advanced identity card and more marketing than you could shake a viagra-penis-extending-email-stick at (we all get those emails, - right?).

Here is that previous paragraph in facebook's new fun and exciting social language:
[Interests] [Activities] [Books] [believe] [revolution] [evolution] [life] [nutritious boxes] [binary] [produce] [tag] [computer] [identity card] [marketing] [info] [identity card] [viagra] [penis] [email] [stick]

So...

Now I can find other people that also like [nutritious boxes] and [binary] and [penis] = none of which I am particularly enthralled with anyway so what I am trying to get at is

hasn't this actually damaged the usability of this site in a big way?

I feel that it would have been in the interests of the highly popular social site to keep social interests at heart but now it seems that blogging is the only 'oldspeak' left in an electronically social sense. And soon all this will be a thing of the past, being sold out as unnecessary, slow or inefficient. In this new world of simplicity let us not forget how many words a picture paints (and there is STILL a market for paintings). I would like to hang on to some of the traditions of media producing even in an electronic world built by metadata [meta-data] as I feel it is still important to maintain true quality of interpretation.

It is most definitely 1984 as far as I'm concerned or maybe it's even 2012 happening before our very eyes... Either that or facebook knows better of what I mean when I write [produce] or [life]?!?! I am meant to find comfort in something which is attempting to destroy my online individuality and turn me into a number just like George Orwell's 'Newspeak'. This marks the beginning of an end for 'social' networking as we have become to know it Once changed, so little will ever be the same again. Now our entire language and the way that we have found a way to communicate will change again, marketing strategies, advertising... the lot.

This will affect not only our social networking. Business networking will also be greatly affected as the snowball roles over our individuality and making those cowboy builders, well - [builders] again. When are we going to stop and ask what it is which we are creating or more importantly what it is which we are destroying? If you don't know what I'm on about, then read Mr Orwells 'insight' into life as expected 26 years ago.

Metadata does to art what piracy did to the music industry.

If you require this in large print, braille, Ashspeak, newspeak or any other binary language, then just get in touch and I'll see what I can do.

[Ashley][Knight][Author]