As I type this my view of Facebook is slowly mutating into pictures of 80s cartoon characters. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, because I as much as anyone regard 80s kids TV as the pinnacle of creative genius never to be seen again.

But when the 5^th or 6^th person changed their profile picture, I had to ask, what the hell is going on?

It turns out that a ‘campaign from the NSPCC’ is encouraging people to change their profile pictures between the 4^th and 6^th of December 2010 to ‘raise awareness’ for the charity.

I have 2 immediate problems with this:

1)     This is not an official NSPCC campaign, it wasn’t hard to check.
2)     Just how does changing your profile picture to a cartoon character accomplish anything at all?

Now I won’t do down the work of the charity, which, like most charities, is very laudable, necessary, and worthy of support. The NSPCC is however a very large, national charity and it’s not a reach to assume that vast majority are aware of its existence. A campaign which makes you vaguely aware of their continued presence in the world doesn’t seem very worthy. So what is going on?

Around the World with Willy Fogg was the best anyway

It’s not hard to work out. Facebook is chock-full of needless ‘groups’ that are the social networking equivalent of the old emails which said ‘FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW OR A KITTEN WILL DIE’, and similar. Those emails were also annoying, full of inaccurate information (if purporting to be about a real thing) and invariably a waste of time. Such emails, some from 10 years ago, occasionally re-circulate when some impressionable person sends it off to hundreds of people, who then send it on in the same manner, and so on.

Facebook groups are equally pointless. Their sole intent is to get a critical mass of people who ‘Like’ the group, and there are millions of such groups where people state their support of things such as ‘NO TUITION FEES’ or ‘CHARLIE BROOKER FOR PM’ and even ’10 MILLION PEOPLE AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT’.

All such groups are meaningless. Very often once they’ve acquired a huge number of people pointlessly ‘Liking’ the group, and thus becoming susceptible to updates from that group in their news feeds, it’ll start sending out massive spamming adverts to those hundreds of thousands of people, and no doubt making a tidy profit in the process. The original intent of the group is long gone, even if it genuinely existed in the first place.

What frustrates me more is the general susceptibility of the average person, who both assumes the initiative is genuine (for no reason other than a charity’s name is attached), and then believes that following the instructions in some way does that charity some good. If you really want to help a charity the best thing you can actually do when you come across some kind of garbled nonsense like this is to donate some money to them. They will find it much more effective than the questionable ‘awareness raising’ your cartoon picture is doing. If you were looking for a way to satisfy your need to feel like you’re doing some selfless good, reaching into your pocket is a great deal more meaningful.

Don’t be a sheep and mindlessly pass these things on. Do a little research, ascertain the credibility of something you’re being asked to repeat, and consider whether it’s actually a worthwhile thing to do. Don’t get caught up in yet another viral hoax that is nothing but self-serving to its creator. Come on people, none of this is even hard.