With every passing decade new methods of self-expression leak out into the Internet. Tagborads, Blogs, and Livejournals began the need to connect with the world until Facebook and Myspace came along. Every website started to coax people more and more to express themselves in different ways. What began as a personal diary/journal and public instant messenger connected and spruced up with the idea of gaming and personal-webpage development to create a site that causes people to want to “form an existence” and be noticed by others.
Now, the Internet has transformed once again to an even more personal manner. Instead of creating a page that reveals “who I am and this is what I like”, sites such as Twitter and FML exist merely to focus on the purpose of expressing a detailed “status message” about the highlights of someone’s day. Therefore these sites inadvertently create a way to rant, cure boredom, while forming a sense of connection between people having similar if not worse troubles. In this manner, the Internet has moved away from the detail about identity and into a world where anonymous people gather to share stories. At the same time, just like with the rest of the Internet these entries could be lies posted simply because they are humorous tales of what people would want to read. I agree that such sites as these are amusing but aside from a cure for boredom, FML and Twitter are practically pointless. Both are just different angles of looking into other people’s lives.
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I'm warning you now, I'm about to make a HORRIBLE comparison.
ReplyDeleteFML is a lot like the Bible. The stories inside could be true. You can choose not to believe them or to live by them; you can choose how many should be taken literally and how much should be taken figuratively; you can choose how strongly you wish to react to iit; you can choose how devoutly you want to follow it; you can even pick and choose which parts to believe and which parts to say "that's a load of crap" to.
But they both say this: your life can be better and there are other people out there that are more fucked than you, and here are their stories and here is how you, yourself, avoid eternal damnation from either hell fire or an embaressing fml moment.
The Bible relates to us life lessons, FML relates to us life lessons.
The Bible gives us reasons to be hopeful, FML gives us reasons to view our own situations as not that bad and therefore be hopeful.
The Bible tells us what the worst is that can happen; FML provides very vivid examples of what the worst is that can happen.
People cling to whatever they can to have hope and to see that their lives are not horrible things created by an unjust God. In seeing that other people have worse lives, they gain what that sense of hope.
That being said--I am catholic. And I love FML.