I never understood the allure of Facebook.
What I don’t understand is the need to broadcast details of one’s life. I’m distrustful of people for the most part and I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable having my personal details for the world to see.
I’m told that facebook is a good way to keep in touch, to that I only ask “Whatever happened to email?” I know what the answer is; facebook allows for a sphere of acquaintances where email does not. Who would go around emailing all of their semi-friends? Email takes time and effort. I guess I’m biased against this reason because I don’t bother with anyone but those really close to me. The motions of feigned interest in another person’s life that you can’t be bothered to meet once a year are distasteful to me.
I’m not bashing facebook, I know others live their life differently than I do mine. I’m just explaining my reasoning. Some do wish to keep in touch with a huge circle of people and that’s cool. It’s just not for me. A well written, thoughtful email (I even try letters once in awhile) is much more to my liking.
PS. Pardon the lateness, I know I said I’d have this out on Saturday… tsk.
March 20th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I don’t think it’s feigned interest per se.
I guess it’s a mortal fear of missing out on something (on the part of us who track others) and a mortal fear of being overlooked (on the part of us who post to these services).
Yes, I think it’s as simple as that. Mortal fear.
April 4th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Ooooh a post about Facebook. Let my bashing commence.
I deleted Facebook. It was great when only university students could use it and applications were non-existant. Then came the high schoolers which lessened the intellience level of Facebook (but this can be debated). Then everyone was allowed to join allowing marketers and employees to start watching you – something that is dangerous no matter WHAT the case is. And then finally came applications. There are two problems with applications: 1) They spam you. Especially when some idiot programmer decided to make it mandatory to send a notification the shit to 15 other friends so that they can partake in the “Is your dildo big enough?” quiz so that you can take it yourself. 2) When you add an application it forces you to divulge any information it needs from you from your profile, what you look at, etc. That shit just became needlessly unsafe so I deleted the fegarbage.
Apparently though you can never really delete an account. You can only suspend it. Were I to log in again, that vile account of mine would become active again. I made sure to delete all the fields and pictures in my profile before deleting the account, but I’m sure they have that backed up on a database somewhere and right now Coke marketers are figuring out based on my info that the next great flavour should be chocolate-cake-anime-girl-seizure-flavoured coke.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Wow.
The passion…
I can’t say I was ever worried about the safety of facebook, I see everyone has a different angle.