“Billy aims at giving “life lessons” by making fun of people spending too much time on their electronic devices and on social media”
Few days ago, a friend of mine posted a strange post with a cartoon character named Billy. When you click this link you end up on a page entitled “Be Like Billy”, the post contains a link where you could enter your name and your gender informations then wait for the small picture/text to get ready. From this link I generated my a personal description in five sentences: “This is Margot. Margot has an iPhone 6S Plus. Margot won’t take selfies in front of every mirror in the house to show off. Margot is humble. Be Like Margot.” Those five sentences are quite ironical, describing what I’m not doing on social media to get attention from my friend’s list. I don’t own an iPhone 6S and I still don’t know who Billy is but I feel flattered for not being considered as wired on Facebook.
Determined to guess who Billy might be I finally found out he is the invention of the internet entrepreneur Eugenio Croituru. Here are the words used by Eugenio Croituru to describe the concept of Billy:
“The idea is very simple. ‘Bill’ can be anyone who is smart and has common sense and doesn’t do annoying things,” said the creator. He also added the the character can also be someone who can make fun of himself and would joke about others occasionally.”
Eugenio Croituru
Billy aims at giving “life lessons” by making fun of people spending too much time on their electronic devices and on social media. Bill reached over “1.3 million Likes” on 7th January after first post of the cartoon was shared on social media. It is even possible to buy t-shirts, hoodies, polo shirts and accessories to be part of Billy’s community. Here are examples taken from Be Like Bill Facebook Page and Mashable’s website:
However, Billy has a twin brother named Dick and a second Facebook Page named Don’t Be Like Dick using the same layout and ironical tone; Dick does dangerous things that no one would ever think of doing because of common sense. I picked some examples of Don’t Be Like Dick Facebook Page:
And here’s my own “don”t description:
To conclude, here’s a creative way used by the creator Eugenio Croitoru to use humor and teach us we must find the right balance between social media, smartphones and real life.I think Billy and Dick are original reminders calling everyone back to reality. Smartphones must be considered as an communicating tool, helping us to get in touch with people we need to. Smartphone can’t replace real life social rituals and should be a supportive engine keeping private life unspoiled. I agree on Croitoru’s vision of denouncing this urgent need we have sometimes of making every tiny bit of our existence public.
At the same time, people of my age – I’m 23 – keep on asking something they heard from someone else about me and start gossiping if I don’t post a status. Posting is like clarifying and proving you are not passive. In my opinion, sharing an article I like is quite nice but it won’t widen my friend’s list. My real friends come to talk to me by private messages because they care and like me they avoid sharing and commenting on public pages because it is something becoming too common. Billy makes me think it is so important to live every instant of your life because technologies can be fixed but human life is too short.