So it appears that I've been invited to join the Exodus out of Facebook, in search of a more promising place on the internet. As I write this from a public computer in the East Asian Library, it sounds like quite the reasonable proposal.
For a start, I can (and usually do) reach the people that I want to socialize with via means other than facebook. Second, facebook is a great way to waste large amounts of time that could otherwise be channeled into activities such as curing cancer or inventing a better mousetrap. Third, the majority of content on facebook is spam. These days, most all of the event invitations I get come from people I only peripherally know.
While these are pretty compelling reasons to not use facebook on a frequent basis, I'll probably keep one anyway. It's a pretty powerful directory in terms of looking other people up, and there's a definite utility to being able to contact acquaintances in a non-threatening, non-committal way. Basically, I think I've come to the point where I've realized that facebook isn't by any means an essential social networking tool, and as a consequence, have stopped wasting most of my free time browsing it. I wonder if the generation that invented the telephone had to deal with this. Anyway, I'm keeping my facebook, unless Ramon gives me a damned good reason not to.
1 comment:
I use it to do the kind of light instantaneous chats with all the other kids in the international community for time sensitive stuff like - let's rally and get thai food in kennedy in 10? We're all in different halls and spread out, so its nice to have everyone in one place in the intarwebs.
But yeah I'm firmly in the anti-facebook camp.
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