Facebook is a planet within ours, with its codes like any society

Facebook seems to have ingested all my interest, those last times. Have I been sacrificed on the altar of Fashion? Am I a fashion victim? No way. A couple of years ago, I was being very critical regarding this social network inside of which I was lost. Where could I fit in this huge web made of virtual humanity? What was my mission? What in the world was the use of Facebook? Was it about collecting friends to decorate a wall, like a hunter hangs his trophies above the fireplace? Was it about sending glittering hearts to people you have never met? Was it about pretending you are a farmer or a bar tender, and that the work is done by typing some keys on your laptop? Well… Maybe.

Under the pretext to rally all human beings to the cause of friendship and universality, to unite all the lonely people in the world in face of their PC screen, Facebook is essentially a great opportunity for advertisers but also a threat hovering around our need for intimacy.

For those few reasons, Facebook looked a bit dubious, although I have eventually stepped into FB planet. I played the game. Digging up old friendships like you would collect scattered pieces of a giant puzzle game, is thrilling. Past and present are merging and suddenly time seems to crystallize. Faded love stories, lost friends, sweet memories are revived through the miracle of virtual meshing. Odd that the virtual allows us today to renew this real relationship with our past. But that is not all…

Let’s admit it. Facebook grants us our very own celebrity moment. Even if it remains rather restricted for most of us. Some words left on out wall may bring us some appreciation or even a few heartening comments. Our family photos albums are transformed into a celebrity magazine flicked through our circle of friends. We have become the paparazzi of our own life which snippets are thrown to overall  tamed and sweet lions. I feed therefore I am.

In spite of all, I like Facebook. In a naive and genuine way somehow. Because of all those people who were, have become or became again my friends. I am not hinting at those acquaintances, with whom you hardly share anything but an annoying game or a vague interest in a popstar. I am thinking of men and women that I regard highly, that I respect, because I know fragments of their life. Brothers and sisters sharing the same emotions, the same need for love and recognition. If our planet could look a little bit like Facebook, if only my town could look like Facebook… The world is so small since Facebook came in but my neighbors are still perfect strangers to me.

Ken with "real" hair

Around 10 or so, I started to be interested in Ken, those male Barbie dolls. There were only a few of them in Belgium back then but I probably bought all you could find in toys stores. And as I never had enough boys for my games purpose, I would sometimes buy Action Man or Big Jim dolls. In order to make the male dolls look more genuine, I used to put a bit of cotton inside their pants.

This one has a 60's look and is wearing a groovy dark pink dress and white boots

I think she was Barbie's youngest sister

She was supposed to be a softball player

The Darwin Awards are meant to reward the stupidest, the most absurd deaths. Yes, you read well! Some people are at their peak right at the end of their life. When you read the story of their decease, you cannot help but crack a grin. Some people’s life is a failure, some people’s death is a failure. Let me tell you a few anecdotes.

In South Carolina, Ken Charles Barger’s cell phone suddenly rings. Still in the haze of a dream, the man turns to his bedside table, picks up his… Smith & Wesson gun and shoots himself.

Nah! Weapons are not dangerous. Robert Shovestall was trying to convince his wife. “My guns are not even loaded. Watch this : I’m taking this one, randomly and I am holding it to my head.” No need to say what happened next.

Sometimes, it is just a twist of fate. In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a young girl who has had enough of life wants to jump from a bridge. Fifty persons or so are gathered on the bridge and trying to prevent her from following through. There were so many people on the bridge that suddenly the structure collapsed. Nine persons died in this tragedy. Did I tell you that the lady survived…

A bridge too far

TV director Mike Stewart is shooting a documentary on the bridges that were too low in the Dallas area, Texas. As he was sitting on the top of a truck to film a scene, his head violently banged on a low bridge’s pediment…

What an irony! Mr. Jennings, 54 is very sick and really believes he will die in a matter of minutes. So he confesses to his wife that he has cheated her at least three times. Infuriated, his spouse slashes him with scissors. Autopsy revealed that Jennings suffered only from a minor stomach ulcer.

Suspecting her husband to be unfaithful, Vera Czermak is about to commit suicide. As she is jumping out of the window, she eventually crashes on her husband who choked to death!

Salvatore Chirilino is looking for four-leaf clovers on a roadside. Suddenly, he slips on the grass and falls down in a 200 feet deep pit.

Oh and here is the last one. A chicken falls in a wall in Cairo. An 18 year old boy tries to save it but ends up drowning. His sister and two brothers are rushing to his rescue but unfortunately cannot swim. Two neighbors are then jumping in the well but are swallowed up by the water as well! When the rescuers are pulling up the six corpses, they are bringing back the chicken which is alive and well…

All these stories and more at http://www.darwinawards.com/

The vacuum cleaner is suddenly out of breath, the refrigerator is literally freezing to death, the washing machine is out of order, the TV set displays a black screen, the car unexpectedly breaks down…

Our everyday objects are hardly getting repaired nowadays and preferably getting replaced. Nobody seems to be incensed anymore when a 10 year old car end up to scrap metal or when a washing machine is washed out after 7 years of service.

After all… if all this was scheduled… I have pondered a lot about this, finding it strange that accessories of our daily existence have a surprisingly short life span. It seems that I never get my money’s worth. Don’t you find it irritating that the coffee maker or the DVD player stop working just a few days after the end of the legal warranty?

Since the Roaring Twenties, products are indeed manufactured to have a limited life span. The obvious purpose is to whip up consuming habits. However, what looks like a matter of logic and survival for capitalism, is an aberration: growth’s goal is exactly to… grow ad infinitum. “An object which doesn’t eventually wear out, is a business tragedy.” This comment could be read in a 1928 magazine. Today,  this kind of consideration is a tragedy for humanity.

Consume and be consumed

This mass littering is swelling up, polluting our subsoils and our oceans, destroying our environment and killing Third World populations. In Africa, wasting is an inanity. Throwing away is a no-no. Recycling material is the rule. Repairing is providing objects a second life. The Western outdated computers are poisoning Ghana but its inhabitants are tirelessly recycling our PC’s. Simply because our computers, our printers, our cell phones are not damaged beyond repair. They wear out for trading sake, because it was written in their chips. Consume, consumers, consume your life and your planet.

Some economists like French Serge Latouche advocate for another social model: degrowth. Unbridled consumerism goes along with natural resources’ destruction, degrowth activists are stating. Less consuming cannot harm anyone. On the contrary. Slimming down our carbon footprint and compelling companies to put the emphasis on products’ quality and longevity, as well as on environmental conservation, will certainly not harm our world. It will humanize it.        

Though, the more Internet was invading my life, the more I was getting interested into dusty books, forgotten somewhere in an attic, exhaling musty and mothballs smells. Those books had a life of their own and seemed to take a new breath of life, once the dust blown and the cobwebs swept away.

Immediate contentment, readiness, efficiency are featured among the undeniable advantages.  However, the more I surf on the Internet waves, the more I lose profoundness, the more I deprive myself from the benefits of slowness. My passion for reading was waning but the need for physical contact with books, remained.

Brushing a book is touching the past with the tip of your finger and of your soul. The old paper has kept its ghosts which are released when dogeared pages are turned. It feels like the heady perfume of a dry rose is wrapping around my inquisitive forefinger. It feels like ancient sensations are slipping under your skin to reach your nerves and spreading through your body slowly inhabited by past spirits.

If I like sniffing pages of a brand new book, I must say that the steep price has eventually put me off. I favor low prices old books that you can still hunt out in some second-hand bookshops. Travel through time starts there.

No PC keyboard in the world is able to carry on this unique, voluptuous sensation. When paper books have disappeared, some old rare volumes will remain, like some museum artifacts, relics of an era when literature was blooming on delicate and scented materials, when literature was leading to a taste for words and cogitation.