Joanna wanted to write a squeak.
She wanted to squeak about her life.
What she had been doing and so on.
She wanted someone to acknowledge her existence.
You see lots of Joanna’s friends felt they were as insignificant as plankton floating benignly on the gentle and undulating surface of the Great Pacific Ocean (or perhaps more appositely the skin of a municipal pond). Or that they were mice in a cavernous underground cellar who would never see the star light (feature on X Factor).
Anyhow, as a consequence of a series of innovations including Web 2.0, reality television, and Cheryl Crumb, Joanna’s friends dreamed BIG. And when they went online to squeak about their lives they felt the need to be someone – it wasn’t any good any more to hold down an unassuming job in Londis, hang out by the swings, play spin the bottle every now and again – and yet the gulf between who they were (plankton floating on the surface of the Great Pacific Ocean or mice in a cavernous underground cellar) and who they wanted to be (Cheryl Crumb) was wide and getting wider.
Web 2.0 enabled Joanna and her friends to create UGC; that’s user generated content to the average chap you’ll find buying groceries from Londis. So Joanna and her friends could all of a sudden post videos of them doing their make up on IMeMy Space, and record themselves singing karoke (in the style of Cheryl Crumb) on ItsUorMeBitch.com. And on top of this they could communicate with people they had and would never meet using one hundred and something characters and a series of facial expressions derived from one hundred and something keys on their computer.
Moving on..while it is the common perception reality television was the brain child of Keith Chegwin, it wasn’t, we have Channel Four to blame instead. Over a decade ago Channel Four made a show based on a famously over rated George Orwell novel, incidentally revolving around the year of my birth (me, the author). The show was publicised so well vast numbers of (typically) young people, many of them Joanna’s age, became convinced it was a) real (it wasn’t) b) worth their while watching (again it wasn’t, even if you happened to be cursed with immortality) c) they could be famous for simply being themselves (when they couldn’t).
Cheryl Crumb, meanwhile, is notorious (in the gutter press) for being beautiful and glamorous, slightly less notorious for being expertly staged managed by her public relations team, as well as for funding the burgeoning fake hair industry. In many ways she is the embodiment of reality television with her extensions, false eye lashes, playboy bunny smile etcetera, i.e. not real. But of course to Joanna and her friends Cheryl Crumb is real enough, they want to be her, and Web 2.0 and Channel Four help them feel an affiliation with her. Thing is Cheryl Crumb the God breathed human being isn’t really there at all: she’s a fragrance, a shampoo, a pot of mascara, a compressed voice spewed out of a pink iPod. I would like the rap artist with the split personality - M and M - to ask for the real Cheryl Crumb to please stand up. Without heels she is five feet one, and in essence it may be that she is also plankton floating on the gentle and undulating surface of the Pacific Ocean , or a mouse in a cavernous underground cellar unable to see the star light just like Joanna and her friends.
Indeed it may be..but..it serves everyone a whole lot better if Cheryl Crumb is BIG, if she is the star light. After all the world revolves around the idea of aspiration, including the economy, our pounds and our dollars make the planet turn on it’s axis. And human beings, including Joanna and her friends, and Cheryl Crumb’s public relations team, as well as the employees of Channel Four, even the creators of Web 2.0 and Keith Chegwin, you and I, like to have something to dream at, something to aim for, a goal, a word on a wing or simply a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow; it’s the best mechanism we have for rising above the muckiness and mundanity of day to day existence, and pretending all is not as grey as it can seem.
And as for the reality TV show based on George Orwell’s famously over rated novel, it and shows like it simultaneously work as an inspiration for those with aspirations and as a comfort blanket for the rest of us who realise we, as apparently sometimes warm, kind and generous human beings, aren’t as bad as we might think in comparison with some other ‘real’ people. (Admittedly watching the BBC or ITN news can give you the same sensation).
So when you’re next in front of your computer screen and you feel the need to squeak, instead of telling fellow squeakers whereabouts you are seated in Starbucks, whether the radiator is working in your bathroom, or how many glasses of bubbly you had last night and how much your head hurts, or indeed posting a audiovisual link to your new Cheryl Crumb impersonation, why not simply squeak..‘I’m alright, Jack’. No one will notice you for it.
But that’s OK!
I promise you, you are guaranteed to have left a finger print at least somewhere.
On something.
Perhaps even a mark on someone.
Therefore you are real. And you being here in the first place is meaningful.
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