I set up a MySpace page a long time ago, and ever since have grumbled every time I have to update it, or respond to a message, because the interface is so clunky and difficult. I swore I would never do such a thing again.
So, hello Facebook.
I know, I know, stop laughing. The thing is, Facebook is so much cleaner, easier, nicer than MySpace that I suddenly get why people do it. I’m still figuring out my way around it, and deciding how to set things up, but I hope that if you are a Facebook user you’ll be my friend.
I’m also on Twitter these days, which I find sometimes scary-overwhelming and sometimes incredibly useful and fun. It’s like being in a stadium full of people and having a shouted exchange with friends on the other side of the field, while also overhearing random bits of strangers’ conversations, which every once in a while tell you something that you actually needed to know right now — a weird and wonderful synchronicity.
I’ve always been a fan of the concept of social media — for other people. I’ve never thought of myself as “social” in a way that fits with this kind of technology. But it turns out there’s a place for me too. I’ll never be the person who sends 100 twitter messages in an hour (and frankly, those people drive me nuts), but the twitterverse has space for me, and sometimes my little 140-character messages become someone else’s “overheard on Twitter” moment of the day. It’s interesting. So far, I like it.
I’ll be leaving MySpace soon. But I’ll stay on Facebook, and probably also set up a Humans At Work page there. And you can occasionally find me in a corner of Twitter, waving my arms about something. If you’re there, wave back.
I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with social media. Love it? Hate it? Can’t be bothered? All opinions welcome.
I find the social media concept interesting, yet as in life I am as shy and reserved online as I am in person. I do love the ability to catch up with friends and family, who are located in different parts of the country. I also find as I am getting older and reconnecting with people,it tends to make the world seem less overwhelming and closer if that makes any sense.
I find it all endlessly fascinating, and sometimes very useful. It also helps keep me sane while living in a small country town where I have no close friends. But it is also a huge time sink.
A couple of pet hates:
– social media “consultants” who claim that there is one correct way to use the tools.
– people who insist that if they friend/follow/whatever you then you have a moral duty to reciprocate, even if you have never heard of them.
Ahhhhhh! It’s too much. I’ll check out your face book site, though. I liked the pictures on my space. And of course, I read your blog every day. You know, I’m goig to miss all those huge hardback volumes of letters that will probably be published for the last time after my generation dies off. People actually saved their correspondence. Snoopy people like me want to read it, so people publish it. Oh well, no more nostalgia. If it wasn’t for the net, I wouldn’t be talking to you.
I’m on facebook all day, well, I just don’t sign off and check here and there throughout the day. I actually like the daily status updates, even when they are sometimes a few times a day, but there is an author that updates almost every hour, saying something about her book, and a few other people that update every hour, and that is annoying, but ignorable, very ignorable.
I often wonder if I am a facebook stalker, but, really I am just enjoying catching up with people I haven’t hung with in 15+ years. In fact, a dozen or so of us are getting together on Saturday night, because we all re-connected on here, which I am equally excited and nervous about.
The main thing to understand with facebook, is that you only have to do what you want to on here, and you can ignore everything else. When people send things to you (notifications; drinks, plants, cause requests, hugs, etc.), there is a link to “ignore all” and I suggest you open what you want, and then hit that ignore button and not feel the slightest bit guilty about it. If you don’t, in a few weeks, you may become overwhelmed and decide you hate fb because of all the requests. Seriously, ignore them and anything else that becomes annoying, and enjoy everything else.
I for one, was on myspace everyday, and was putting off fb, now I haven’t been on there for a couple of months it seems.
welcome Kelley, hope you stay connected on facebook!
🙂
jen g
I haven’t been to Facebook or MySpace yet. As I hear more discussion of it, I find I don’t feel attracted. At a dinner party the other night the discussion became quite heated about whether it is appropriate for employers to check out people on Facebook before hiring. As the talk soared through legalities and ethics, I found myself marveling at the many ways these days to effect self-disclosure. How hungry people seem to be to be seen!
When I hear the word Facebook I always see those galleries of faces at the end of high school yearbooks. When I worked on the yearbook it was a big deal how many citations of clubs and awards went with each student’s entry. I still wonder at that: the obsession with the lifelong accumulation of resume isn’t helpful to growing a face willing to be open and present, I fear.
Oh my! What a fuddy-duddy I am today…
I was a late FB adopter, and just got on a couple of months ago. Now I love it. Though I echo Jen’s comments above about using the ignore button. No one is notified when you ignore a request—use it at will. Also, at the bottom of the news feed is a link to control the feed. You can choose people to never appear in your feed, which is what I do with people who post way too much or stuff I’m not interested in.
The site is not very intuitive, and it’s not easy to find your way around. My gf says it’s because it’s kind of accreted as people use it.
To me FB is like sitting in the Horn of the Moon Cafe in Montpelier VT where I grew up. The cafe’s full of people I know and don’t know; I hear snippets of their conversations; someone comes out from the kitchen to say hi; a friend sits down at the table with me to chat for a while; someone else waves through the window; the free papers are all lined up along the rail if I want to read them; there are always political petitions of one kind or another (“Stop Vermont Yankee!”; “Free Leonard Peltier”; “End Contra Aid”). I can pay attention to as much or as little of it as I want. It helps me feel connected in a daily and casual way to people I don’t see often, and to the things that are important or interesting or funny to them, to whatever’s on their mind.
Just last week I was friended by someone I went to high school with. We weren’t friends particularly—I think we sang in choir together and I’m not sure we ever shared a class. I’m not in touch with anyone from high school. But there she was, 30 years later, checking in in an unobtrusive and friendly way. It really surprised and touched me.
Jean, please, you are the least fuddy-duddy person I know, practically. We just see it differently. From my perspective, I can’t undo the technology — the web exists and if I am to interact at all with it, I will leave traces of myself. And so I choose to control parts of that presentation, and to use it, as Barbara points out, to talk to people that I’d otherwise never meet.
But it’s just a tool, which means there are a million ways to use it, some of them less happy than others. Evaluating people for a job based on their Fbook presence is one of the less happy uses.
But the genie’s not going back in the bottle. So here we are, all of us way more connected than we used to be, and it’s getting harder to stay off this particular grid.
Beth, I’ve been to Horn of the Moon. Nicola and I were in Montpelier several years ago when she taught MFA students for a week. N was teaching all day, very busy, so I kicked around Montpelier some. And my friend Ronnie came up from NYC for a day, and we had lunch at HotM. Lovely place. Your description brings it back so vividly.
I don’t think potential employers are that big a problem. The only way (as far as I know) that they can spy on you is if your privacy settings are much more loose than they should be. Just set most of your profile to “friends only,” and leave only your name—and possibly education/work/profile-picture/network-list/etc—visible to anyone in your networks. And don’t check the box that files your profile with external search engines. Employers can cheat their way into networks, but they can’t force-friend you. And even when you do friend someone, you can still limit what they see if you want to.
Of course, it is a little creepy how many random tidbits about my life Facebook could have if they wanted to use it, and Mark Zuckerberg isn’t necessarily an angel. But it’s not a new thing for governments and corporations to have the potential to know creepy things, and that’s just the price of living on the grid.
I hated Facebook when I first got it, but I think it was more a reaction against people than against the technology—the shallowness of all the million sentences. I blared “Living in America” from Rent really, really loud that day. I have since grown to sometimes delight in what seems, on the surface, to be shallow—which had more to do with life than Facebook. I am now a proud Facebook addict. I really think Beth’s comparison to such a cafe is a good one.
Barbara, I think you are right about the letters – it’s a huge loss.
I am fairly anti-social in general. So all of these ‘social media’ things had absolutely no appeal to me. But. After some prompting from friends, I finally decided to try facebook. Way better interface than MySpace which I hate to even visit (except maybe for a musician’s page). To my surprise, I enjoyed it at the beginning. Had some fun posting a few things, etc.
I joined FB right around the time of the election and passage of Prop 8. The power of FB became obvious very quickly. Protests and people were mobilized much faster than ever before in history because of Facebook. It was phenomenal to see.
Then I signed up for Twitter – primarily to check it out as a marketing tool. And I was surprised at the usefulness of it. I actually learn useful things on there. A couple of weeks ago I found something about a technical photo question thru a search on twitter I had been searching for it on google for a while, but hadn’t found much.
Once I tested uploading a snapshot as a twitpic link. I posted the link, then went back to my twitter page and clicked on it to see if it had worked. In the 30 seconds or so it took me to switch over, 8 people had already viewed my pic. It’s a powerful medium.
I just haven’t had time to do much with it.
Lately facebook has really started to bug me tho. People from all over are finding me – people from 3rd grade. I don’t mind ignoring all the little things people send me, but I do feel guilty not responding to people that used to be important in my life. The thing is I just don’t have time… And I kind of am glad to reconnect, but some of it is over the top.
Then yesterday, a got a friend request from someone I’ve wanted to hear from for years. When I saw that, I got all misty eyed. And now, I’m a huge FB fan.
I have since grown to sometimes delight in what seems, on the surface, to be shallow
Adrian, it made me smile to read this. I don’t know if our experience is the same, but I do know that I am finding a real value in the “virtual wave across the crowded lobby of the world” that Facebook and Twitter provide. I’m learning that not all communication has to be protracted or deep to be meaningful to me. This idea of reconnecting is especially fascinating; checking in from a distance on people that I’ve known for 30+ years but don’t really ever get to talk to, and suddenly here we all are in this large lobby, waving at each other, and knowing that our history together still matters. And that now we have a way to express that and still go on with our busy, busy days.
I don’t always have the energy for the extensive emails, the epistolary relationship, but I have time (in chunks) for blogs and comments and twitter.
More about this in an upcoming post, so will stop for now.
Oh, Kelley, have you ever considered joining goodreads.com? (http://www.goodreads.com/author/confirm/125883.Kelley_Eskridge) I was just editing your profile wiki-style and it occurred to me that it would be much cooler if you were actually on it. : )