First off, I’d like to apologize for my absence from this location the past couple of weeks. If my absence wasn’t noticeable, I’d like to again apologize for making the assumption it might be. Narcissism is an ugly trait. Like
First off, I’d like to apologize for my absence from this location the past couple of weeks.
If my absence wasn’t noticeable, I’d like to again apologize for making the assumption it might be. Narcissism is an ugly trait.
Like the previous two, this week I was again struggling to come up with a topic on which to opine, when I saw the editor’s note (pg. 2). Nathan Eagle, our editor, talks about how he pulled the plug on his Facebook account for a variety of reasons that all seem very valid.
Having said that, I’m about to do something that could get me a few extra weekend shifts on the work schedule: I’m going to completely disagree with his statements.
I remember being introduced to Facebook in its infancy. Going to college from 2001-05 put me squarely in the initial generation of users who actually had to type out “thefacebook.com” on a web browser, instead of just thumbing an iPhone icon.
By the way, I must say that dropping that first “the” probably made Mark Zuckerberg an additional $2 billion. Brilliant.
Anyway, at first the site was incredibly basic and just let you see profile information people cared to share with their friends. There was no writing on someone’s wall, there was definitely no posting photo albums and I think the only real way to get in touch with someone was by seeing if they put their e-mail address or AIM screen name (why does that seem ancient?) in their profile.
I wasn’t enamored with it at the beginning. It wasn’t really until I got out of college that they roped me in.
Facebook is probably most useful for someone like me, and by “like me,” I mean completely disorganized in their personal life. Without the one-stop shopping experience of Facebook, I would have lost touch with a huge number of people.
Take a look at my room and it’s pretty easy to determine I’m not someone with detailed and categorized e-mail address books.
The counterpoint to this statement is that “if you aren’t close enough to keep in touch via other outlets, you don’t need to be Facebook friends, anyway.”
I hear you loud and clear, Johnny Glass-Half-Empty, but what does it cost to maintain a superficial friendship with somebody? I know people like to argue that having so many relationships with people one never sees in person somehow de-values the real life relationships. I don’t really understand that leap.
I like to test out jokes on Facebook. If I come up with an idea that gets a “like” from both my college roommate and my aunt, that’s a fuzzy feeling.
I’ve gotten to do some cool things to this point in my existence, some of them involving travel. I’ve now experienced different countries with about 80 people. Without knowing they were all listed on a single site that I could access at my convenience, they’d be as distant as they were before we met.
Within a single comment thread, I can have a “conversation” with friends from New Jersey, Canada and Australia, at each person’s leisure. People I went to Spain with, or Israel with, or camp with, or detention with… Why would I want to give that up and, more importantly, what’s the harm?
I get a lot of easy information from Facebook, without actually seeking it out. Do I need that information? Probably not, but I haven’t hit cranium capacity just yet.
Oh, so and so just had a baby. How nice.
Oh, so and so just got engaged. How nice.
I’m sure the women know that guys can spend a full day with each other and not have a good answer for their girlfriend who asks “So what’s new with Jim?”
Now they might.
“Well I assume he’s looking for work because he wrote on Eddie’s wall that he needs help with his resume, and on Tom’s wall that he needs his suit back.”
There are also people who I wasn’t especially close with at an earlier stage, but through random interactions, we now have a much more real friendship, though I suppose “real” is all relative. In my head, this is worthwhile because I think it makes me a happier person.
I spend a decent amount of time on the computer. I get home late at night and I don’t currently have a TV, so whatever the attempt at entertainment — music, movies, streaming sports — it comes from my laptop. Facebook isn’t ever something keeping me from going outside, it’s just something I’ll be looking at in addition to whatever else I have going on on the screen — a true ADD generation comment.
I understand that there is a highly voyeuristic side that probably isn’t especially healthy. I’m still waiting for the first time I meet someone, feel like I’m certain we’ve met before, then realize I saw them throwing up in the background of a friend’s photo.
(Maybe not that exact scenario, but you get the gist.)
Yes there are privacy issues and settings that need to be altered in order to feel fully secure, but I think that if I purged my Facebook account, I’d lose out on a lot more than what I’d gain.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go update my status to “somehow just wrote 25 inches of copy when ‘Facebook is kinda awesome’ would have sufficed”.
