All My Friends Are Absent

At 5.17pm, according to my Facebook page ‘No one is online’. Imagine of no one really was online? This simple statement of fact regarding the absence of any of my ‘friends’ strikes me as profound.

   I wonder if I could go to any other page on the ‘net and also find that no one is online?

   Imagine that there really is no one online anywhere and that all the forums and social network pages were empty...tumbleweed rolls through digital space...not a soul...just me staring at my screen...a post digital apocalypse in which I am the only person left in the world with access to the internet...me and government agencies...who only have one person to spy on...me. They would find my activities rather dull since I don’t visit politically radical sites. They may, however, shake their heads and sigh at my obsession with visiting Boomkat...

   I need more ‘friends’, obviously, yet Facebook is already such a distraction that to have lots of ‘friends’ would prove to be a kind of trap which I’d find very hard to escape...all those chat boxes popping up...it would be rude to ignore a message.

   Yet the widening of the social circle online may prove valuable in that it must increase my chances of making contact with someone who may be useful in many ways...tips about film, books, music and, not least of all, that one person who could further my writing career, which barely exists...which is why I need that someone, a manager, promoter...more pertinently, an editor, probably.

   Ah, the loneliness of a potentially long-distance FB member...all those potential ‘friends’ around the world...an alternative to finding out that I have none...online...right now...