I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook....It's fun. It provides an easy (if somewhat bland) method of one-to-many communication. It lets you keep track of those parts of their lives your friends are willing to share. It even helps you get a sense of how bored people are, based on the number of surveys and quizzes they're taking each day.I am now seeing it more and more as a cocktail party. But at the same time your Facebook friends are at your cocktail party, they are also at an unknown number of other cocktail parties. Sometimes, due to the magic of mutual friends, these parties may overlap in surprising ways.
But I also hate Facebook. I blame it for an overall decline in the level of conversation - quantity-wise, at least - on the blogosphere. Some of the best and longest-running bloggers I know of have abandoned their blogs in favor of Facebook. And while blogs are a one-to-all form of communication, Facebook only allows other members of Facebook, or even designated friends, to read items that an individual has posted. Instead of madmen shouting on the commons, it is a restricted-access cocktail party.
I have several broad groups of friends. Fellow bloggers - now, in too many cases, former bloggers - were the first people I linked up with. Then people I know in "real life" - or, as I like to say, bricks-and-mortar friends. Then people I know online through sites like The Comics Curmudgeon and later, through the efforts of some dedicated fellow Felbernauts, Adam Felber's Fanatical Apathy. Then the people who I met or saw perform at the Sideshow Gatherings over the last three years. Then an influx of people I knew in high school, many of whom I haven't seen or been in touch with in a quarter of a century. Then occasional random new friends, like the person I met as a result of a comment I made on an article about, of all things, bar codes, who has turned out to be an extremely interesting and welcome addition to my circle of friends. And then friends of friends, such as those who sent friend requests after one of my friends recommended that they link up with me to get automatic access to my daily blog posts.
All this makes for a pretty crowded cocktail party. Some people I know, some people I am just getting to know. Some people I am starting to back away from very quickly, while others remain relatively silent.
Of course, the party I am seeing is not the same party they are seeing. They are seeing comments from and among their own friends, including me. It becomes like a cocktail party occupied by video displays of the various guests, each of which is present at multiple parties simultaneously. I suppose this is less a simile than a definition.
So, if you're at that party, welcome. Chat a bit with the other guests. I'll be making statements from time to time, usually in the form of reposts of my daily blog posts from Another Monkey, but sometimes as Facebook-only exclusives.
But be warned. This is my party. If you act like an asshole, start abusing the other guests, or - well, hey, if I just plain decide I've taken a dislike to you, I'll show you to the door. Maybe kick you off the porch. Maybe hide you or block you or delete you entirely.
If you don't like it, tough. You've got your own cocktail party. Run that however you see fit.
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3 comments:
Blogs are so last decade. In the era of social networking, it is more efficient to hang out with 100 people than it is to hang out with 1.
Facebook is essentially ephemeral. What someone said a year ago, or a month ago, is lost into the ether - unless Facebook is maintaining petabytes of storage space somewhere. And even if they are, good luck trying to retrieve stuff more than a few screens back.
And unless they are deleted, blogs have an air of semi-permanence. People still hit posts that I wrote in my first months of blogging by way of Google searches, and I can read posts written by other people years ago. But these days I guess ephemerality is something to be desired, and the accountability that comes with the persistence of things that you've written in the past is something most people want to avoid.
I agree with you about the relative permanance of a blog, but I have to come here to keep up with one person, and I can go to facebook to keep up with 400 people at once. Only 3 of my peeps even have a blog (that I know of). You update yours almost daily, but Jen is much less frequent, and the third person last updated his blog 10 months ago.
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