“Talk to me!”, says I.
“Who are you?”, says the stranger.
“I am no one!”, says I.
“Sorry, I haven’t got time for your pain”, says he shuffling away. Or was it a she?

So have you been invited to join Google+ yet? As of this writing, I haven’t, and it’s probably a good thing, too, because I can only generate so many social niceties per day, certainly not enough to spread around to all the social networking platforms that currently exist in cyberspace.

As I wrote in another post, I ‘did’ MySpace, now on autopilot, and I currently ‘do’ Facebook. I also use Twitter and share my comments on the nonsensical news of the day there (follow me, follow me). But in terms of conversation, there’s not much happening there. Yes, in other words no one will talk to me. Does that phase me, you ask? Not in the least. Though I might confess to being a bit irked.

Now I was told by a Twitter expert, who is wise in the ways of social media, that I needed to ‘start talking’ if I wanted to get the party started. I understand completely. Just as it is with real social circles, some folks are reticent to engage in pleasantries with someone who talks to himself.

“Hello!? Hello!? I’m alive over here!”, I might tweet. The silence is deafening. Not even a retweet.
An email soon finds it’s way to my inbox with the subject line reading “follow me and I’ll follow you”. It’s from ‘dudecashwise362’. “Where are we going?” I reply in an email. No response.

Ok. you all know how it goes. Having something interesting, witty, or life affirming to say won’t get you very far in social networking, unless you are a celebrity and don’t mind commenting in passing on what you ate for brunch. Though, if you really are a celebrity, you’d no doubt have someone else do the tweeting  for you, and eat your lunch for you, as well (#winning).

If you are a ‘no one’, however, then there is only so much self abuse you can take by ‘tweeting’ to a flock of ‘we don’t care’ celebrity stools. Yes, celebritism is alive and well, and those who worship every celebrity dropping certainly have no time for you.

So, the big question, however, is do I really want to get the ‘party’ started, especially with celebrity intensive zombie types? I must confess that these days I’m not much in the ‘party’ mood; I’m in the writing mood. So, do I really want to put my creative energies into blithering banter, glib chitchat and all manners of cyber persiflage? I’d say no. If I did, I’d probably have no time for my blog … which most likely no on reads, except for ‘search bots’. Anyway, zombies, by the way, are not really big on conversation; they just want to eat your brain … which leads me to my next point.

Google+ makes me nervous. Honestly. Use of an arithmetic function seems less social oriented and more machine language enamored. Machines are not social creatures. They interface. Not very sexy.

We’ve seen this before with Google Wave and Google Buzz. If anything, Google+ seems a bit more insidious, especially in that Google already it’s spindly talons into all forms of online services. Yes, Google’s aim is to make this personal. It doesn’t want to own just your email, blogs, videos, RSS feeds, surf and search habits, cloud based personal and business documents, and both computer and mobile telephony operating systems. It wants the whole ball of wax: your online social identity and that of our friends and business colleagues, as well as theirs, and theirs, and theirs, and so on, and so on, and so on. It also wants control of your applications and hardware. Sound familiar?

Cloud based computing? Give me a break! It seems that Google’s intentions have gone far beyond creating its own version of George Orwell’s dystopian society in his novel 1984. Pulling a “Big Brother is watching you” number on us by keeping up under surveillance and controlling our ‘freedom of  choice’ via media streaming (Youtube and Adwords, for example) is bad enough. But I suspect, that Google wants even more… or is even more.

Some of you have seen films such as the Matrix (Keannu Reeves: Whoa!) or the Terminator (SkyNet). Maybe you’ve watched Battlestar Galactica on TV and are weary of ‘cylons’ lurking around every corner. Remember HAL9000, the paranoid and homicidal sentient computer from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? What about the supercomputer, WOPR, from the film Wargames? I could even mention an odd film called Demon Seed, but that would be really perverse!

In these films, the names change and the plots may be different, but the one salient feature these all have in common is the subjugation of the human masses by an authoritarian body that knows all via technology.

Is Google a burgeoning SkyNet? Is Google really just taking names, numbers, and personal data, biding its time under false pretenses, waiting for the moment to attack?

My fellow ‘Netizens’, now is the time for a preemptive strike against what is no doubt some artificial intelligence lurking in the Google controlled and operated web clouds. Now is the time to send a clear message to all of humanity to pull the plug on Google and it’s designs for world domination. At the very least, tell Google+ that we don’t want it horning in on our social circles. I’d tell you to write your congressman, but he’s probably too busy sexting someone.

Lord! And they say the hackers are the bad guys! (Cue the Love Boat theme)….
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PS. Thanks for reading. Seriously,  what is your take on Google+? Is it me or is Google really desperate here? Are you concerned about why you haven’t received an invitation, or are you still trying to figure out what Tumblr is? Let me know.

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