7.) The Manifesto on How to Be Social When You're Being Anti-Social

Hey, do you want to be my friend? What? You’re not on Facebook? Is that even possible? I thought it was, like, a law of physics or something. I guess you’re just anti-social.

Facebook and other social media sites play a huge role in the development of our culture, not to mention that of friends, farms, fish, and gangsters. And spammers. But let’s not go there. Without Facebook, what would “friend” mean? Didn’t they invent that word? No? Well, at least they made it a verb. Just like Google (I google, you google, he/she/it googles) has created a new word in the English language and, I dare say, numerous other tongues, Facebook and other social media sites have created, changed, or altered the meaning of numerous words. These include “friend,” “tweet,” “like,” and “creepy stalker.” With regards to that last one, the sites have also created new ways of being rather unkind to others, such as spamming their walls, popularizing rumors, and burning their FarmVilles and pillaging their Café Worlds. I’m not sure if that’s actually a feature, but if you’re listening, Zynga….

Cute bird + Simple command = The quintessence of low.

(Image courtesy of http://technorati.com/blogging/article/trouble-deciding-who-to-follow-on/)

As for Twitter, I’m technically a member (username: xavieryes; password: *********, not necessarily in that order), but virtually never use it. Heh. See what I did there? Virtually? It’s a website? Huh? Huh? Oh, for crying out loud – it’s a pun, dagnabbit. Just like Twitter. I’m sure that makes sense somehow, and it provides a convenient leap from tangent to topic. I find the whole “tweeting” thing to be rather obnoxious. “hey, guyz, guss wat? im in da kitchen makin a sammich.” Okay, so maybe that isn’t a completely accurate representation. There probably wouldn’t be a period at the end. But people tweet about everything from Growl improvements to bowel movements. (For those who don’t know, Growl is a computer program that conveniently fits this admittedly irritating little rhyme.) This has to stop. Now.

But what can we do? How can we combat the insipid, ineffective ignoramuses who invite intelligent insults? Well, for starters, we could kill them, but that probably wouldn’t work out too well for either party. We could vandalize their computers, spray-painting “’I’m’ has a capital and an apostrophe, you know-nothing twit” on their monitors. Or, since that probably wouldn’t fit, we could create bumper stickers that say “Save the Grammar,” peel them off, and staple-gun them to the offender’s forehead. That might work. But probably the best way to enforce laws of decency is to remove the grammar-illiterate from the very thing that keeps them alive. That’s right. The Internet. Manifesto, OUT.