Social Nutworking - The Results (kinda)

I've just spent six months on Facebook and I'm ready to give my interim grades. Right now I give it a C-. Is it nice to find all of my old friends and family and have a handy vehicle to talk with them and keep up with them .... yes. But it does not take long for the distasteful side of this to appear, and that really taints the entire experience for me.

First, you must understand that, dispite all of the sales pitches about how great social networking is, the primary reason it exists is so that the social networking providers can gather and sell information to advertisers and vendors so they can all make money off of you. You, and especially your information, are vital commodities to be bought and sold. I am not comfotable in this role as "information bitch." I am a private person and I feel my life is my business and "IF" I decide to let you in on any of it I will. The idea that everything I say, do, write, and contribute to the provider becomes their "property" to sell as they wish just makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Second, many people have no actual lives and social networking quickly becomes an addiction that billows into the rediculous. It gives the average person an incredibly overblown sense of self-importance because they can publish something and they feel that (for some unknown reason) the entire world is reading their stuff, and it makes them feel important. They then become convinced that they need to keep the world informed and start posting every stupid little thing they see, think, or do to the networking site(s). People actually spend their entire day posting shit like "I woke up," "I'm having breakfast now. I like pancakes," "ate something yesterday that is not agreeing with me today," "time for my shower," "going to sleep." When I read stuff like that my response (to myself - of course) is STFU! Who cares? This is just drivel and helps dilute the good parts of social networking. Facebook has a lot of this, but the WORST offender is Twitter. This was designed for, and it overused by, two kinds of people, those with exceptionally overblown senses of self-importance who truly believe the world really DOES need to know everything they think and do, and those with no lives at all, who actually subscribe to the twitter pages of the arrogant assholes in order to have lives, and, in so doing, further feed the imagined self-importance of the posters. It is a psychological experiment in self-reinforcing delusion.

Third, just like in real life there are assholes and bullies who feel like really big people when they can shout down or rip apart someone else. In real-life you can often see those people coming and just avoid them. In cyberspace, because you are often at the mercy of the privacy settings of people you talk to, these shitheads just pop up out of nowhere and try to take over. They try to crush your opinion, they are insulting, they are denigrating, and there is almost nothing you can do about them, unlike real-life. This is a very discouraging and disheartening thing.

Lastly, this just becomes another consumer of your life and time. You begin to feel obligated to check your page multiple times a day "just in case" someone has sent you a message. So instead of possibly relaxing, or doing something constructive with your time, you end up spending even more lost lifetime sitting behind your computer (or phone) anxiously waiting for someone else to acknowledge you. This is also distasteful.

So what am I going to do? I will continue to stay with Facebook for another six months and give it a full year. But, based on my experiences and the way I like to live my life, I am making some changes to my usage. I am going to cull my friends list. I have allowed people in as my friends because I used to work with them, even though we were not really close friends then. I want my friends list to be people I really care something about, not everyone on the globe, so I will start cutting off some of the bit players. I am going to do a LOT more of my correspondence with friends by PRIVATE MESSAGES so that the assholes can't interrupt and disturb me. If I don't feed their stupidity, maybe they will die and fall away. I am going to only post publicly if I think I have anything to post that may be of interest. I am going to avoid giving public opinion (don't feed the dickheads) and avoid responding to other people's stupid public opinions (don't feed the dickheads). I think I'm going to print a big sign and tape it up by my computer that says DON'T FEED THE DICKHEADS !!!! This should help remind me to hold my tongue.

So, the first six months was mixed, but, I am going to change the way I use the product and see if my experience improves. The only thing that is for sure is that it is good for advertising. I created pages for the two websites I manage and within days the hit rates began to climb after being very steady for years. I guess this all goes back to the first point. We are all just commodities anymore.

Final grade and decision on whether to continue in six months.