Why do we Bebo?
What? More Bebo? An attempt to understand Bebo at Tuppenceworth.ie.
Ironically, or perhaps cleverly, one of the Bebo’s initial technical limitations – till recently, users lacked any form of search facility – effectively acted as what psychologists refer to as a ‘variable ratio conditioning schedule’. By making the discovery of a familiar (or attractive) profile, reliant on unpredictable amounts of link crawling through networks of friends and friends of friends, Bebo effectively conditioned its users to continually surf its listings. The same strategy has long been employed by slot machines to separate gamblers from their tokens. It’s not uncommon to observe Beboer’s in college (and more and more frequently second level) computer labs nationwide, delving several levels ‘deep’ to discover connections, or soak up the every social detail of attractive strangers - in a manner that has become known as ‘Bebo Stalking’.
Speaking of stalking, the lack of a dating culture in Ireland – or more accurately, the bootstrapping of 80’s Catholic sexual repression to naughties Sex in the City sexual liberation, may also have influenced Bebo’s wildfire success. With no way to easily, and unthreateningly, continue a relationship begun with semi-anonymous gropage under the glare and chemical confusion of a club or student pub, exchanging – or stalking – Bebo pages, provides a much needed safe haven for interested students to get to know one another; an oasis, otherwise lacking; in a contemporary ‘dating’ environment with all the hospitality of Mao’s China.
The nak bags are at large on Bebo and you also have people using it who post articles like this. It’s truly all conquering. Bebo previously.
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Bebo: blogs for the technically retarded.
Comment by Stephen — March 28, 2006 @ 9:17 pm
lol
Comment by ger — March 28, 2006 @ 9:52 pm
Bebo is a very very good thing for online users. Bebo shows ordinary non techy people how they can be creative online without having to use any special tools. Of course the usual elitist wankers will look down their noses at bebo users the same way they look down at windows users or those that don’t know the keyboard shortcuts to do everything or use a GUI when all that’s needed is a terminal interface.
The world wide web was made for information and cultural sharing. It’s great that bebo is messy, it’s great that the people that use it don’t know anything about how to set up a blog or how to use emacs or Vi. The same way it’s great that people no longer have to fuck around with memory allocation on their computers or the majority of people who use mobiles don’t have to be a wireless engineer to use them.
The web is going to become average and that’s a really really good thing even for techies and elitists though many will be too busy spouting the “I was the 4th person online and in my day” type bollox.
Comment by Damien Mulley — March 28, 2006 @ 11:13 pm
Eh, bebo is a friend site. u cant even search, u can only see friend of friends. myspace n okcupid r the sex obsessed ones. and myspace is all bout expressing urself n bn understood n meeting strangers. eugh… i call bebo healty, innocent fun. end of. and the home pages have no ads either.
Comment by cat — March 29, 2006 @ 3:43 pm
i told you you shouldn’t have said anything!!
Comment by dagit — March 29, 2006 @ 8:39 pm