Kerrie Murphy | October 07, 2008
MARTIN Fry, lead singer of 1980s band ABC once sang "Bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom yeah, Bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom yeah". And Defrag thinks we can all learn something from that.
But a few seconds later in that same song is a chorus with even greater learning from capabilities. It goes: "Vanity kills, it don't pay bills."And what we can all learn from that is that Fry loved a good rhyme.
He was forever rhyming cupid with stupid, situation and combination and, in Defrag's favourite pairing, violin and everything. They don't write them like that any more, people.
That's probably because far from killing, vanity does in fact pay bills. How else can you explain the fact that Kim Kardashian is not starving in the gutter?
But we'll have to let Fry slide on that one, because the 1980s was a simpler time - a time when men wore make-up and women had short spiky haircuts.
If you wanted the world to look at you, you had to at least form a synth band and stand around in the background while talented people did the work. Now all you have to do is join a social networking site.
A psychological study from the University of Georgia finds that sites such as Facebook encourage narcissistic traits in people.
As soon as Defrag heard this, we logged on to the site so we could post a link to it and tell all 88 of our closest friends exactly what we thought of it. And what we thought of it was, to put it in highly technical terms, duh.
In fact, it's a little like a study that Defrag is working on, which is to determine whether Defrag likes to sit on the lounge eating Turkish pizza and watching The Mighty Boosh. It is only early days, but preliminary data suggests the answer is yes.
According to the study, the people with the most friends and wall postings are more likely to be narcissists.
They assemble a profile that casts themselves in a positive light with flattering pictures and carefully chosen personal information, and then friend as many people as possible to show how popular they are.
When Defrag heard this, we instantly started to wonder if we were narcissistic because we chose a profile picture that looked OK, instead of say, that one of us in hospital when we were off our face on pethidine.
Then we started wondering if we should start unfriending people, especially since we only vaguely remember who some of them are and we only friended them because it seemed rude not to. Then we thought that spending all this time thinking about ourselves and wondering if we were narcissistic made us narcissistic. Finally, it occurred to us that we had spent the past decade getting paid to spew out random thoughts about IT, wrestling and 1980s pop culture in a respected national broadsheet newspaper and so the narcissism boat sailed a long time ago and Defrag was up the front, doing the whole "King of the World" bit from Titanic.
Luckily, the people behind the study said they were focusing on narcissism not as a clinical disorder, but as a personality trait and that those who had it didn't necessarily need therapy.
Which is just as well, because talking about themselves even more is probably the last thing a Facebook user needs.
TOP 10
This week:
DIGG has received $US28.7 million in venture capital. Here are the top 10 signs a social networking site is knee-deep in dough.
10. They start coming up on Google searches as "things that have more dollars than the US stock exchange".
9. The developers no longer live at home with mum.
8. They invest heavily in cloning research - because they want a real planet earth, not a virtual one.
7. Known trolls and flamers start disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
6. Everybody has the same status update: rolling in large piles of money.
5. Your login automatically fails unless you have a servant type in the password.
4. The gold card that comes with "exclusive membership" really is gold.
3. The site makes no attempt to sucker more cash from its members by having them pay for "premium" accounts - well, not as much as usual, anyway.
2. Discussions about Linux are way down, while discussions of Lexus are on the rise.
1. "Click here for free money" actually works.
Contributors: Edward Mallet, Graham Wilcox, Tom Mercer, Keith Cundale, Don Knowles, Emma Crane and Peter Walsh.
Next Week: Wired.com's excellent Lore Sjoberg has compiled a list of the geekiest cruises, including the Caribbean Gambit Chess Cruise. Send us the top 10 ways you can tell you're on a geek cruise. Answers by Thursday please to OzDefrag@Gmail.com