I joined Facebook this week, after months of resistance.
It felt like everyone I knew was on (and you know, seated at the cool table in the high school cafeteria), but once I signed up I wasn’t sure who to search for, and I was (pleasantly!) surprised at the people who weren’t there. I’m fairly good at keeping in touch with people: I come from a small town; I went to school for (over, in some cases) ten years with the same people I went to preschool with, and if I needed to find you, the easiest way might very well be to send my mom down to the grocery store to hit your mom up for information. That said, I also have some nomadic tendencies: I move a lot, and I sometimes use that as an excuse to move away from the things I just don’t want to deal with. Facebook, with all of its sparkling promises to reconnect me with people I willingly left behind didn’t seem very useful for me. (And let’s not get me starting on how reluctant I am to get my network on).
I signed up with my roommate next to me on the couch (our laptops on our laps, the Miss Universe Pageant—ironically!—on the television and those delicious miniature strawberry coffee cakes slowly finding their destinies). I had six friends within the first fifteen minutes. One of my friends—hereafter referred to as “The Penguin”—called me long distance to squeal with glee. I then got to post on various walls and search for groups, and it was fun times and all, but I don’t think it would have been quite the riot it turned out to be if my roommate had not been spurring me on (“friend me bitch!”). I’ll have to see.
One of the articles for this week mentioned that some RSS theorists think that it will bring about the end of email. I know that a some of my friends use email less now that they have Facebook (and probably used it less after the advent of MSN too). The RSS article was about the slow phasing out of email newsletters, and in terms of those kinds of marketing techniques (“Elf minions! Now 60% off in April!” or “Books at the Library About a Controversial Topic Recently in the News”), I would much rather get it through an RSS feed. I think the chances of mistaking it for spam (since you have to subscribe to the RSS feed) are less too.
I suppose that at the root of all of this is the persistent, niggling little belief that all of this social software I’m signing up for isn’t bringing me closer to people, it’s just creating more perfunctional ways of pretending to keep in touch, or more exotic ways to disappear (a la Second Life). Is The Penguin, for example, going to be less likely to email me now that she knows I can get daily updates via her status? Is my roommate going to leave me notes on my wall when I’ve forgotten to do the dishes? How soon is it before I find out about a friend’s engagement through an RSS feed, instead of a mass email?
Stay turned for a post about the readings and case studies.
1 comment:
I love your comments about the fact that social software may not be bringing us any closer to people. We become so dependent on all the streams of information that allow us to socialize without ever going out of our room. I feel, too, that this allows us to live in an "unreal" world cut off from the real one.
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