Losing the thread

I am writing this now for one reason, and one reason only: Facebook is, characteristically enough, refusing to load on my computer.

I feel cut off, ostracised, betrayed. I can't communicate. It's akin to losing your voice, only less of a shock, as it happens at least every three days. I'm one of those people who doesn't use Facebook for its social networking abilities. Instead, I primarily use it to argue with strangers. For some reason, this makes my inability to log on even more frustrating.

Facebook, along with sites of a similar nature, has become one of the most recent addictive substances of modern society. This is far from being a big deal: a new narcotic appears almost every week. Computer games, sudoku, happy-slapping (sorry): our civilisation gets hooked on things novel at an alarming rate. But this one is actually strong enough to give me withdrawal symptoms. I'm not normally inclined that way - unlike about half of the population, I'm capable of going 24 hours sans mobile phone without hyperventilating - so why, when I have so many better things to do with my time, do I feel so angered by my estrangement from this one online service?

In part, it's down to social instinct. I know people on there; people I can only distinguish by a name, a photograph and a writing style, but to whose defence I feel compelled to leap to if necessary, often before discerning whether or not they actually deserve it. More importantly, I have enemies. I have productive and not-so-productive arguments going with half a dozen of them, and while I'm unable to contribute, they're given the last word by default. I need to pontificate, goddamnit!

To be honest, though, the above explanation seems like a smokescreen; something you believe wholeheartedly, but is nevertheless untrue. I suspect Facebook is a symptom of a deeper illness: the desire to make your mark. Why else would my reaction, on finding myself unable to post in beloved forums such as Government + Religion = Disaster, be to instantly start blogging instead? It smells of intellectual narcissism: I must have my say, people must be aware of my existence, they must listen to me, to me, to me.

It has to be said that this is nothing new, and certainly nothing to do with the information age. I may have a mild dependency issue with online communication, but it's normal to feel the need to interact with other people; in fact, anyone who doesn't is generally branded a sociopath. Despite its ubiquitousness in the modern world, the internet is capable of creating a certain stigma. If I met someone over the net, and subsequently started going out with them, I would probably find this embarrassing to admit to other people, even though there is no logical difference between finding love at work and finding love on Myspace.

[Note: while writing this, I've noticed that Facebook has actually managed to do its job properly and is now welcoming me with open arms. Too late. I've been sidetracked.]

Human beings need to be heard, to stand up and be counted. They often try to achieve this in spectacularly ineffective ways - when I argue with bigots and libertarians and Abba fans on Facebook, as when I write on this blog that nobody reads, I am clearly crying in the wilderness. Perhaps such things serve a similar function to dreams, or to talking to yourself: the audience, fictional or otherwise, is simply a device that allows you to marshal your own thoughts.

Or maybe I'm over-thinking it. This is something I'm used to doing, and I've been prevented from doing it. If I went down my local pub, only for it to tell me that it was suffering from an internal runtime error and could not process my request for a pint at this time, I'd be equally annoyed. But it remains that communicating online has become as normal as communicating in your home or workplace or bus stop, even if people on Facebook tend to refer to offline conversations as occurring in "the real world". We've been presented with an entire new dimension of existence, and - true to form - it's irritating us already.