Mashed Articles

Feeling lonely on the internet is an odd sensation, but a survey from last month suggests it’s a growing problem. At the click of a mouse, you can connect with millions of people – and not just random members of the smelly flesh-army that is humanity, but people who share your interests, actually want to talk and may even type ‘LOL’ at your jokes.

It’s just not the same though. A whopping 60 per cent of tech-savvy people aged 18 to 35 are apparently complaining of often feeling lonely, as opposed to just 35 per cent of the traditionally isolated over-55s. This is the age group for whom services like Facebook have supposedly done wonders for staying in touch.

Obviously, all surveys of this ilk should be taken with a pinch of salt capable of melting a glacier, but this one wouldn’t surprise me. For starters, if you’re feeling down, sometimes a social service is the last thing you want to be plugged into. Either you’re one click away from seeing what a much better day everyone you know is having, whether they’re splashing on the beach or preparing for a party you’d have been blissfully unaware of not having been invited to, or it’s the interactive equivalent of a grey weekend in Norwich – everyone complaining of how much they’re sitting around in the rain, breaking up with their former loved ones, drowning in a treacle sea of underpaid work and just generally having a lousy epoch.

It’s a wider issue than just Facebook, though. Take gaming. Back in the day, you had just one console and friends would come round to play things like Mario Kart with you on a split-screen display. People would get together for LAN parties and head to cybercafés. Now, multiplayer gaming’s primarily done online, with players sitting alone and communicating on headphones. Not only are we separated by distance, we’re separated by our characters. Nobody ever called their friend ‘Yoshi’ during a Mario Kart race, but play something like World of Warcraft and if it’s not a character name you go by, you simply become ‘the tank’ or ‘the mage’ – just one cog out of 25.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. Rock Band is a great example of a game where people still get together to play, as are a number of Wii games. In general though, as online games get more social, they’re getting lonelier. Even lonelier than single-player games in many ways, thanks to providing a weak, unsatisfying experience rather than an alternative. Social networking is increasingly following suit, with the sheer volume of content spewing out of the pipes. Recently, it’s just mass shouting. Nobody really cares what your Spotify playlists are, any more than clicking a Facebook ‘Like’ button can replace actually telling someone that you liked something. That’s not to say that these things can’t be useful in their own right – ‘Like’ buttons are fine for highlighting new content you might not otherwise have seen (seeing that someone’s watching a new show is good for remembering that it’s on), but it’s not so much social as a replacement for it. The lack of effort means that people are sharing more, but also that it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s the online equivalent of the ubiquitous ‘Alright, mate?’

One of the most surprising things about all this social interaction is how little it focuses on actual real-world connections, especially given the sheer weight of information in the much-ballyhooed social graphs everyone wants to build up. Take online dating for instance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg claims that by looking at online profiles, he can tell who’s going to hook up with whom, which is a good trick. Yet still Facebook lacks any real service that skips the usual questionnaires and glorified personal adverts in favour of just looking at your data and interests and saying ‘You, call You’. Foursquare focuses on checking into places and sharing that information, but only as far as making up silly games about mayors and meeting up with existing friends, not trying expand your real-life social network by suggesting: ‘Why not say hello to these people next time you’re there.’

There are so many things that social networking could offer if it focused more on the social side: actually meeting people and doing things, instead of just building endless lists of friends you hardly see any more. As it is, it’s providing endless ways of keeping us trapped at our PCs, making sure that our music choices and profile pictures say what we want them to, and that no friends will mock us for having an overgrown Farmville. No wonder so many of us are feeling lost in the cloud.

When I was about 13 years old, a rumour – one of those rumours whose origin is never really known – started to spread around our family. The rumour was that my grandpa was keeping all his money hidden somewhere in the bowels of his house rather than entrusting it to a bank.

I remember my cousins and I laughing sagely at such an anachronistic and quaint idea. Surely it was only people in children’s stories who did such a thing. I mean, come on – why would anyone be suspicious of banks? Why would anybody rather stuff their money into a mattress than entrust it to one of England’s many respected financial institutions? Err…

The tale of my grandpa’s natural distrust of major corporations has always stayed with me, and it struck me as a pertinent opener for this column, given the current war that’s being waged for your online identity. The reason for this is because that war – ultimately – centres on trust.

A few years ago, if someone asked you for your online home, the chances are that the more tech-savvy among us would have replied with a personalised URL. (If you were lucky enough to secure your name, it might have been something like www.danoliver.co.uk.) You had complete control over your own site, and that felt good. But these domains were simply silos of personal information, and a real effort was required from visitors to find it – they had to first remember that they wanted to visit your site, then recall the URL and TLD and then – God forbid – actually type it in!

When the social web got into full swing, there was a new way to connect online that enabled people to include you in their social circle. Rather than having to actively visit your site, people could integrate your stream into their social service of choice. Hallelujah!

Many sites and apps have come and gone, and the likes of Google and Microsoft are constantly trying – and mostly failing – to make headway in the social space. The current war for users is being waged between two relatively new adversaries: Twitter and Facebook. The times when you’d tell people to find you online via a personal site have been replaced for millions of net users by Twitter’s ‘@’ identifier, or a Facebook account. Both Twitter and Facebook want you to use them as the default way for other people to find and interact with you online, but they’re going about it in very different ways.

Twitter’s API is already widely used by developers wanting to build the service into sites and apps, and with the recent announcement of its new @anywhere offering, you will soon be able to integrate Twitter into any website with just a few lines of JavaScript (the likes of YouTube, Bing, Digg and Ebay are already signed up to use @anywhere). Twitter’s founder Evan Williams has repeatedly referred to the company’s mantra of ‘keeping things open’, and recent announcements certainly back this up.

Facebook is another story. The company is trying to create a walled garden, but it’s a transparent wall. By changing its privacy policy to recommend that users make their status updates and other information public – as it did at the end of 2009 – Zuckerberg et al are trying to ensure that the major search engines can pick up as much of what you’re up to as possible. There are many people who simply approved these privacy changes without thinking, and who are still unaware that any ‘privacy transition’ actually took place. This has led to accusations against Facebook of ‘nudging’ its members into more open privacy settings – in many cases without their knowledge (we’ve all approved pop-ups without actually reading their content beforehand, especially when they come from a trusted site). For many of Facebook’s users, who signed up on the proviso that Facebook was about building private networks, the goalposts have been significantly moved in recent months – in some cases onto another pitch altogether!

Now, there’s nothing to stop you following my grandpa’s lead, and eschewing the social behemoths that are Facebook and Twitter – more power to your elbow if that’s the way you choose to go. But, if like millions of others, you choose to promote yourself via one of these two platforms – and take advantage of the huge audience, reach, and ease-of-use they offer – then I have just one question for you: out of the two, who would you trust with your cash-filled mattress?

Love it or hate it (hint: you should hate it), Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen was one of the most successful films of last year – having earned around $800 million at the time of writing. And it would probably never have happened, had it not been for a bunch of young men talking about toys on the internet in the mid 1990s.

Want to own every Optimus Prime ever made? You’ll need a few thousand pounds and a garage to keep them in. Picture: Ryan Yzquierdo, Seibertron.com

The precedent was set by enthusiastic discussion in the letters pages of the official Transformers comic, published by Marvel from 1984 until 1991. From this sprang unofficial fanclubs, gatherings and trading circles, all resolutely passionate about an ever-growing line of toys that changed from robots to vehicles (and assorted technology). How to obtain the rare ones, how to reconcile the huge contradictions between the storylines of the various comics and cartoon series, whether Grimlock could possibly beat Galvatron in a fair fight… Many of these enthusiasts also proved to be early adopters of internet discussion, creating a raft of fansites and bulletin boards in the mid-to-late 90s that finally allowed the global Transformers community to get together. Today, that’s grown into a clutch of professional, commercial sites that provide a growing army of fans with up-to-the-minute news about new figures or movie rumours, and extensive photo galleries of the rare toys they yearn to own. ” The fan websites themselves are very competitive in nature and we all strive to make the best sites available,” says Ryan Yzquierdo, owner of the enormous and award-winning US fansite Seibertron.com. “The online community consumes the information we provide as fast as possible and is extremely active.” From the outside looking in, it’s a bizarre phenomenon – so why did it happen?

Fanboy origins

“As its simplest concept Transformers aims at various things that boys, and indeed men, like: Robots, aliens, cars, planes,” thinks Steve Mapes, owner of www.transformertoys.co.uk, a respected British fansite that’s been active since 1999. “It then takes these interests and produces, in a toy form, basically two toys in one. Rather than buying a toy robot and a car, kids can have one toy that is both and changes between the two. This isn’t enough by itself though. There have been, and indeed still are, plenty of other transforming robot lines out there, none of which have been as popular or successfully marketed as the Transformers. A large part of this is the characters and fictional universe that has been shaped over the past 25 years.”

Comics, cartoons, most recently films have all contributed to a vast backstory for the entire range of toys. “It was really smart of the people involved with Transformers way back at the beginning to create stories and personalities for the individual Transformers,” thinks Yzquierdo. “These weren’t just ‘robots’… each of them was a living machine with a personality and abilities and skills. This allowed for people to connect to these unique characters in a way that wasn’t common with robot characters at the time. Because of this, people really bonded with the characters which creates a special loyalty to the characters, the products and ultimately the brand as a whole.”

Even though the brand regularly changed enormously, forever seeking to avoid the retail death that claims most toylines eventually. The blocky vehicles of the 80s became the more complicated but controversial bio-mechanical animals of the mid-90s Beast Wars, then a welcome return to vehicles with R.I.D., Armada and beyond, and now the hyper-realistic, hyper-detailed movie line toys. There isn’t any other action figure line that’s been as consistently successful, or that has drawn the attention of so many adults as well as children.

Classic characters like Megatron are regularly redesigned and updated, often purely to please old-school fans. Picture: Ryan Yzquierdo, Seibertron.com

Who, in turn, wanted to share their knowledge, opinions and collections with like-minded souls. It was in the Beast Wars era that the online community first really sprouted, but not always that happily. There was a deep division between a new generation of Transformers fans who loved the Beast-based toys and the surprisingly smart animated series, and the old guard who were outraged at the change from Optimus Prime to Optimus Primal. “Truck not monkey!” went the battlecry, referring to the hero Autobot leader’s reimagined ‘alt-mode’. Anger being one of the cornerstones of internet discussion, such conflict only grew – and to this day, some fansites refuse to acknowledge the existence of others. “Yeah, there’s still some of the typical internet drama from time-to-time, but for the most part I’d say that the community is pretty good natured,” says Seibertron.com’s Ryan Yzquierdo. “Except for when pics leak from the next new Transformers series. We all think it’s going to be the end of the brand, but then fully accept whatever the latest thing is after we realize just how cool it is.”

Fan collaboration

Indeed, the throughline of passion for the toys remained, however, and the Beast Wars era even saw the animated show’s creators fraternising with and seeking advice from long-term fans on forums. As the millennium ended, fandom boomed – and changed. “My brother and I created our first website Transformers At The Moon back in October 1999, a few months after getting internet access at home”, says Mapes. ” At the time we decided that there was a distinct lack of websites with photographs of the Transformers toys especially many that we owned at the time. One of the main things we would use the internet for at that time was to search for toys that we did have in our collection, especially the much sort after Japanese figures.” This is crucial to the continuance and rise of the random – without the internet, obtaining out-of-print or international-only Transformers was crushingly difficult. Suddenly, there was an easy way to obtain the impossible, and for collectors to thus have collections.

“eBay allowed people the opportunity to easily find desired products which they might have previously only been able to find at specialty shows” explains Ryan Yzquierdo. “It also allowed people to connect from all over the world. It made it easy for a guy in Canada to purchase a toy from someone in the Netherlands. I’ve always thought that accessibility to a product helps increase one’s loyalty to a product. If you can’t find what you want, you move on to something else. If you can easily buy something which interests you, it only encourages that person-to-product relationship, which I’m sure has helped out the Transformers brand over the years.”

Optimus Primal, figurehead of the Beast Wars line, did not satisfy many hardcore enthusiasts. Picture: Ryan Yzquierdo, Seibertron.com

There are layers and layers of figure rarity, meaning there are absurd treasure hunts where everyday collectors fear to tread. Steve Mapes is an particular aficionado of the Lucky Draw Transformers, a very limited, usually gold or silver chrome-coated toy variant that is produced in Japan exclusively as competition prizes – he runs another site specifically dedicated to these at www.luckydrawtransformers.com. “The figures themselves tend to turn up in Japan first and are then quickly snapped up by either Hong Kong or US collectors. Some find their way onto the Japanese Yahoo Auctions website where they are normally won by overseas bidders using bidding service accounts, however others are sold in stores in places like Akihabara. Due to the limited quantity, some can be limited to 3 in the world – these figures can fetch into four figures and so the dealers tend to contact people directly who they have dealt with in the past to see if they are interested in those items. If they are not, then they tend to end up on eBay. A lot of the time it is a case of contacting the right person at the right time and building up a good relationship with them.”

Changing faces

That’s the deepest depths of fandom, however, where it turns into industry as well as enthusiasm. What about the general online community? “It consists of all sorts of people now”, claims Ryan Yzquierdo. “I am fascinated at each annual Transformers convention at how the ‘face’ of the community has changed over the past 15 years. At one time, it consisted mostly of young men, maybe 18 to 25. Now, I see women, families, middle-aged people, tweens, and even some grandparents partaking in this hobby. Sure, it is still dominated by men in their 20s, but that majority has slipped dramatically over the past decade.” Mapes agrees that the demographic stereotypes are gradually eroding: “With people interacting more at a social networking levels real-world friendships are also on the rise and there have been relationships and indeed marriages that have come out of people meeting on message boards around the world with a common interest of Transformers.”

The Michael Bay films might have outraged critics, but they’ve certainly accelerated the growth of this online Transformers community. They’ve also changed it – change forever being a double-edged sword. “There is no denying that that have had a huge impact in changing what was, for many, a secret hobby or interest, into something that is perhaps a little more socially accepted” thinks Mapes. “You can walk down the street and see people walking around with Transformers symbols on their T-shirts, find merchandise in many more stores and see a line that was simply viewed as a kids’ line be discussed by people of a huge age range on message board and forums that are not specially related to Transformers.” The existing fans are split down the middle about this – half overjoyed that their hobby has been essentially validated by the mainstream (with a resultant explosion in available Transformers products), and half feeling it’s diminished and undermined, both by Bay’s insect-like redesigns of the characters they love, and by now having to share their special interest with the rest of the world.

Hasbro’s tendency to repaint and remodel its figures keeps completist fans out of pocket. Picture: Ryan Yzquierdo, Seibertron.com

At the same time, the 1980s ‘Generation One’ characters are regularly referenced and redesigned in new toys and comics, a direct result of Transformers owners Hasbro being well aware of the size and passion of the online community. They’re not just a bunch of silly, annoying men on the internet: they’re a force that has a large disposable income and that will spread hype for free. They’ve even managed to attract the attention of Michael Bay. The explosion-obsessed director largely seems unconcerned about honoring Transformers’ quarter-century history, but was swayed enough by online appeals to let Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime in the 1980s cartoon series, reprise the role in the two 21st century live-action movies. It may be easy to sneer at people who remain this fascinated by transforming robot toys even in adulthood – but there’s no denying the sheer potency of the online community they’ve created.