If these Facebook walls could talk

Social networking — changing the way we communicate and the way we talk smack about one another.

Thanks to our World Wide Wiring, of course, everyone’s guaranteed to have an audience. We’re all sure to get a couple of hits on our blog entries while taking a few verbal swings at whatever’s rubbed us the wrong way. Haikus of hatred follow on Twitter for whoever becomes the immediate object of your aggression; spiteful status messages become logbooks of approval so long as enough profile pedestrians “like” what you dislike; your furry cub of a lover ditches your cougar ass for a wilder — and younger — thing, revenge can be exacted in a click, turning Dr. Douche into the walking penis of the nation, thanks to all that net-dispersed sex footage.

Perhaps, as people who’ve done the nasty in a public place have expressed, transgression is heightened with the prospect of people watching. With the force field of online anonymity, a greater element of impulse gets worked into the mix. Of course, you’d less likely pick on an obese admirer of Twilight marching down the street with a glittery placard that says “R-Patz Twilights Up My Life” than if you saw her video love devotion to Pattinson on YouTube. About 600 people commenting on how said fan girl needs to “get a life” in varying degrees of meanness can’t deny that it’s so much easier to kick the hapless down if you don’t have to actually do it; if you can just leave a one-liner about how “a fat bitch like her needs to get laid.”

Click, Click … Boom

The past two years in our net-izenry have been presided over by a spirit reminiscent of that last scene in Cruel Intentions where an entire schoolyard gets a photocopied handout of Katherine Merteuil’s dirty deeds. Except that, along with the detailing of Merteuil’s sociopathic tendencies and a coke problem, our trivial pursuit has gone as low as ass-essing the two-humped creature that hangs off of Kim Kardashian’s backside and even lower to yukking it up about the collective body stench of Manila’s not-so-beautiful and oh-so-damned. (Come on, like you weren’t loosening your belt to the below-the-belt-ness of Chikatime.) The symbol of this movement: semen dribble. Hastily rendered by laptop touchpad, running down the lip corners of targeted celebs, popularized by self-proclaimed “queen of all media” Perez Hilton.

Fittingly enough, the fall to near-irrelevance of Hilton — both the bimbo and the blob — coincides with a rise in status message anxiety. When Perez himself turned the casual chirp of the tweet into a distress signal recently, asking Twitter followers to “please call the cops” after the Black Eyed Peas’ manager gave him a real black eye for a bad review he gave (and for all the karma the queen may have accumulated up to this point), it occurred to me that we may be nearing a point of socio-virtual enlightenment. That the blogosphere will need to graduate from its high school bathroom stall scrawl some time; from its semen dribble and all. ‘Cause while the allotted screen space and immediacy of a Publish button may beckon us to type whatever we want, reality and repercussion have to be reconsidered in all this.

Hopefully, This Doesn’t Become A Trend…

About two weeks ago, reality itself had flooded one such Facebook wall after its owner had turned status message into a suicide note. Before his profile page became the chair he’d mounted before he’d stepped off to hang himself, it had been a podium he’d used to say his woeful and embittered piece. His sister had been murdered two years ago, his dad had died recently, money problems didn’t make his life’s situation any easier, and the final push to offing himself was that his ex-boyfriend had left him out cold, allegedly kicking him out of their Cebu love nest. “Now that I am forced out… I will go. SORRY AND THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO LOVE AND BELIEVED IN ME,” he’d written before signing off on his account for good, leaving countless comments of shock, awe, grief, and post-mortem prayers in his messages’ wake.

The details surrounding his demise didn’t matter: that he was on drugs, unfaithful and abusive, and relied on his ex-lover for everything from a gym membership to his rent money. Or that after he’d been asked to leave the house he’d shared with his ex, he’d threatened to OD and had begun a status message smear campaign against him. It didn’t even matter that the ex had wanted to sit him down for a peaceful parting of ways — to actually talk face to face without the one-way besmirching statements on Facebook. To the site’s question of “What’s on your mind,” his answers only seemed to resonate with vengeance and an easy way out.

It’s an interesting way to go — for someone to take his status message to the death if he chooses to. Consider it a strident example of the passive-aggressiveness such a tool can permit. Of course, I’m not saying we should all go Emily Post on whatever we choose to post, but calling for a little more civility amid all the randomness and barbarism out there is more than overdue. In our age of complex communication, it all goes back to a couple of old, simple sayings: if you’ve got nothing nice — or sensible, at least — to say, say it to the person’s face. Or, well, don’t say anything at all.