Class snobbery is as old as the hills, and it didn't take long before it infected the internet.
In the early days it was simple: there were cool people and there were AOL users.
Now, though, it's a bit more complicated. Don't despair, though, because online snobbery is still perfectly possible.
Print out this cut-out-and keep guide, pin it to your monitor and you'll always know exactly who to look down on:
People who hang around Friends Reunited all day are either sinister men whose wives don't understand them or women who watch This Morning, fantasise about Phillip Schofield and spend entire days weeping for no good reason.
If you're on Bebo, you're 14. If you're on MySpace, you're not in a band and you're not an imbecile, you're pretending to be 14 and you'll soon be on the front of the local paper.
Facebook is for office jobbers, university graduates and anybody who works for a firm with a three letter name, such as BBC, IBM or the CIA.
Faceparty is currently entertaining the next generation of swingers and page-three girls, while Asmallworld is for those who'll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
iVillage is a terrifying mix of normal, intelligent women and alternative medicine fruitcakes.
MSN is for people who haven't worked out how to change their browser home page.
YouTube is where 12-year-olds post 'fag' on absolutely everything and Yahoo Answers provides a forum for idiots to ask 'How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?'.
For blogs, the cool crowd uses WordPress or Movable Type, amateurs Blogger and lunatics thesun.co.uk.
The BBC attracts angry pensioners, especially to the political content, where they constantly post comments about how the BBC won't dare publish their comments. Meanwhile, local newspaper forums are Fight Club for armchair political activists.
The Daily Mail website is for people who "aren't racist, but" and who'll believe any old bullshit, especially if it involves crystals, cancer or the European Union. Confusingly, it also attracts mischievous B3tans who pretend to be typical Daily Mail website users. As a rule, the more demented the comment the more likely it is to be real.
Then there's Twitter. Recent publicity means its demographic is changing, but it's still largely populated by people who "work in the media, yeah?", shameless self-promoters and social media consultants. These consultants all have 55million followers, all of whom are also social media consultants and can't get through a sentence without monetising it.
Beyond that, the arrival of various celebrities has created two kinds of Twitter user: the people who tweet "@wossy u r so funny LOLLOL", and the people who'd send exactly the same tweets if they thought others wouldn't see them.
And me? I don't use the internet. Have you seen it lately? It's crap!
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First published in .net Issue 188
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