I don’t know if I’ve just become hyper-aware of it, or if everybody that I know really IS on Facebook, but all of them seem to have moved there in the last 6 months. I am still a part of the resistence, but I’m not sure how long I can hold out. My chief lieutenant in this struggle, Michelle, has waffled a bit in recent weeks. There are times I catch her trying to reason out why she SHOULD be on this thing. So far, we’ve managed to stay the course.
I have justified my non-participation in this social networking phenomenon in a variety of ways:
- I have struggled for 10 years now to limit the contact I have with old high school classmates to a select few, and I don’t want to flush all that good work down the toilet.
- The people I’ve spoken to that get really caught up in Facebook once they start makes this website sound a little like heroin; they spend hours and hours online and really get nothing accomplished. At least the countless hours I spend here result in an increase in (mostly useless) knowledge, or some entertainment for you in this webspace. I don’t need another web-based addiction, whether it’s parking wars, or Facebook commodity trading, or whatever.
- I think the truth came out recently from my mom, who reminded me that “[I] don’t really like people.” True enough. The number of people that I dislike vastly outnumbers those that I DO like or CAN tolerate. I prefer my Internet experience to be a one-way street. Not that I’m discouraging your comments by any means, but let’s be honest: I am 100% in control of which ones get published and when…
Despite all this, when SO MANY PEOPLE that you know are talking about something this much, you sort of feel like you need to get out there and understand what it’s about. For someone as net-savvy as myself, it’s rare (to the point of disturbing) that I should have absolutely no experience with such a pervasive Internet entity. I guess that strict lack of knowledge is what’s bothering me here; definitely not feeling an intense desire to stop emailing and start “facebooking” people, or whatever the hell they might call it.
I wonder if the K-Bear ever gets this sort of feeling in relation to our cell phone bet…