Posts Tagged ‘fishing’

Rant

“Sigh…”

As much as I love ‘social networking’ sites (and I do, as evidenced by the spatter of 140-character blue bird shits that now litter my site), it has become somewhat clear that there’s basically two main types of comments people regularly post.

The first is a ‘Bragging‘. The planets have fortuitously aligned and people can’t help but rub your nose it in. Big accomplishment or small joy, it doesn’t matter, they need to brag about it in a rather round-about fashion. Maybe even in the guise of a complaint. An excellent term I heard (from Robert Llewellyn on Twitter) that describes this tactic perfectly is ‘moasting‘ – a combination of moaning and boasting. As his example puts it “Oooh I have to get up really early to do an amazing job. Poor me.“. With celebs, it’s pretty much a given but once you start to look for it, you’ll be surprised by the amount of moasting your friends and family do.

The second is a ‘Fishing‘. When they’re not busy bragging, the attention seekers out there will spend most of their time fishing. Whether for sympathy or compliments, they desperately want it and expect you to supply it. Putting themselves down, hoping to receive a flood of “Nooo, you’re great! Stop that! You know you’re fabulous and if it wasn’t for the fact that you cover your backside at all times, I’d probably have to take to wearing factor 60 sunscreen in your presence!“. A lot of the time, they’ll be feeling a bit sorry for themselves. Luckily, depression only happens to people who constantly engage in fishing for sympathy on social networks. Thank fuck for that, eh? I mean, how much would it suck if everyone felt like shit from time to time? Small mercies, my friend, small mercies.

You’ll be amazed how many status updates, tweets and comments you can divide into just those two categories when you think about it. If the general output from your preferred social network isn’t one of those two types, it’s most probably going to be about what that person had for lunch, instead.

I had a ham sandwich.