Rant against internet youth. I'm feeling opinionated today!

So it *is* possible to enjoy life without a computer?

It does not cease to amaze me that the Myspace-dependent batch of teens are stil around. I had my peak of logging-on-every-other-minute-to-see-if-I-had-a-new-comment in 2005, I think, and this ate me up until about July 2007. I think that above everything else, I was a bit frustrated because I had been locked out of my previous account, and people ignored my pleas to stop contacting that one. So in a true insouciant fashion, thought paying no attention to the problem would make it go away.

However, Facebook now pretty much fills the social (ha!) networking void in my life. Its less attractive interface causes me to waste less time on it. When I joined my new sixth form, and actually gained intelligent friends, they were on Facebook. The profiles are a lot more private on there, too, so there is less temptation for stalking. On the other hand, searching for the group that describes you perfectly can get addictive.

But I even try to avoid Facebook - which has been named as the quickest rising procrastination tool, like, ever - whenever I can. When I get on a computer, after checking my emails, I go onto Last.fm - a site combining music with the social. It monitors what music you listen to with Windows Media Player (boo, hiss), iTunes, and even your iPod. Sad as it seems, I love to see who my most played artists are, and how compatible they are with those of my friends. I mean, you can skip this bit if you don't care what music I am into, but here is every single artist I listened to last week (22nd - 29th June), apparently. I am writing all this to make a statement. Yes, all this music, just from last week, just a fraction of my entire existence on Last.fm, And I have put in bold the lucky guys and gals who also make my Overall Top 50 Artists:

The Strokes, The Dears, Elliott Smith, Arcade Fire, The Divine Comedy, Kings of Leon, Patrick Wolf, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Death Cab For Cutie, Jeff Buckley, Arctic Monkeys, Röyksopp, Muse, B*Witched, Mobile, The Doors, The Stills, Guillemots, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Morrissey, The Futureheads, Tocotronic, Bright Eyes, The Breeders, Maxïmo Park, The Shins, Lily Allen, Foxboro Hot Tubs, Rufus Wainwright, The Kissaway Trail, Naast, The Donnas, Scott Walker, Regina Spektor, Jens Friebe, Disney, Hot Club de Paris, Bloc Party, Kante, Eels, Wir sind Helden, Pulp, CSS, Air, Element of Crime, Art Brut, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Cold War Kids, Beyoncé, Final Fantasy, The Besnard Lakes, Land of Talk, Champion, Antony and the Johnsons, Farin Urlaub, Priestess, The Muffs, Die Goldenen Zitronen, Patrick Watson, Plastiscines, Kelis, Sugababes, You Say Party! We Say Die!, We Are Scientists, Die Sterne, Vitamin C, Tomte, Chris Cornell, We're Marching On, Robert Wyatt, The Coral, Yeti, Dusty Springfield, Metric, The Postal Service, CocoRosie, The Subways, Placebo, Voxtrot, Andrew Bird, The Diagram Brothers, Blink 182, Holy Fuck, 17 Hippies, Seeed, Locas in Love, Chuck Berry, Kate Bush, Eiffel 65, The Mountain Goats, Interpol, Sportfreunde Stiller, Jens Lekman, Bela B. feat. Lee Hazlewood, Camille, Sixpence None The Richer, Nena, Scout Niblett, Dan Mangan, Blondie, Tokyo Police Club, Franz Ferdinand, MGMT, Britney Spears, Taking Back Sunday, The Midway State, Wintersleep, The Flaming Lips, Christina Aguilera, Radiohead, The Earlies.

And then of course, I can find awesome artists who are waiting for me to discover them. Of course there are a few Myspace-girls on there who relish this opportunity to show that they have had 1, 556 plays of whatever band is in style that week and how "phitt" they can look in their avatar, but yeah.

There's Goodreads, to which I have become more recently acquainted. It's like Last.fm, but for books. I have added, rated and reviewed only a fraction of the books I have read. I even paid attention to the embarrassing ones, and the ones I despised. Of course this concept is attractive to all pseudo-intellectual types. But who cares? It's an outlet for my literary-critic tendencies.

The final site that floats my boat is SharedTalk. I absolutely love different langauges and cultures (I now consider French my second language; I know a decent amount of German; I'm beginning to teach myself Russian; and I have snippets of various languages like Italian, Spanish and Greek). Here, you can get in touch with people of your age and interests from all over the world who want to improve their language skills. And it's not at all sleazy, because it's powered by RosettaStone (this celebrated but dead expensive language-learning software. But this site is free, though, by the way).

So, basically, I have abandoned the conventional teen internet crazes, in favour of sites that summarise the three passions in my life: music, literature and language. All this whilst providing opportunities for getting to know other people.

Sure, I'll occasionally check Facebook, Bebo, and Myspace to keep in touch with certain people. But I certainly won't be messing about with HTML, posting status updates that follow my every move, taking countless pouty pictures of myself, search for my soulmate within my postal code, or be a fan of that ubiquitous and highly irritating TV show, Skins. Those things are so insubstantial, and I'm over them. I say, if you're going to waste time, do it with something that reflects your hobby.

If you have one, that is. For your own sake, don't become like this girl, who I've quoted from an actual bulletin: