As I wrote a few days ago, I’m easing into the Twitter thing, though with little of the enthusiasm so far I have for Facebook. The latter site has been a surprising joy, not least because it has reconnected me with so many friends from my high school and college days. It’s nice to see how others have turned out, and frankly, nice for me to show some of my old friends that I turned out okay. A lot of those folks who knew me in the ’80s and ’90s weren’t sure I’d make it to forty, much less be alive and happy and settled and a Dad. I’m glad to be able to let them know that by grace and therapy and stubbornness, I pulled right on through.
In any case, I have something like 1300 friends on Facebook these days. Perhaps 500 or so are students (current and former) at PCC, the rest are friends and relatives acquaintances from other walks of life. Perhaps 150 or so are people whom I’ve never met — but whom I “know” through blogging or through animal rights activism.
In addition to the chance to reconnect and stay connected (something my ENFP self likes very much), I appreciate the platform Facebook gives its users. When I post a link (such as the Heather Corinna piece on older boyfriends two posts belows this one), it shows up in the newsfeeds of all my friends. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of my friends then click on the link. Many of my Facebook friends don’t read my blog regularly, as visiting blog sites is too taxing. Popping my links and status updates in their “news feeds” on Facebook enables me to share content and ideas in a way that allows my friends to see what I’m up to (and what I think they should read) without requiring them to be active followers of my writing. They then have a chance to repost the link, and as the kids say these days “the content goes viral.”
From an activist standpoint (and I consider myself an activist), modern technology (Twitter, Facebook, etcetera) offers new platforms for reaching large numbers of people. Those of us who have a higher profile (in my case, because I’ve been blogging for so long and teaching for far longer) can thus leverage our “friends” and “followers” in the hopes of driving the discussion in the direction we’d like to see it go.
One goal of social networking is to stay in touch. Another, for some people, is to find job, relationship, or hook-up opportunities. And for me, one particularly happy goal of using social networking is nudging friends and associates towards certain sites, possibilities, ideas that I think valuable. After all, in this world we “buy” into other people first and foremost. And once we’ve bought into someone (to the extent that we are curious about their passions and interests,) we can be encouraged to follow them down at least some of the paths they choose to take.
I make no secret of my veganism, my social liberalism, my passion for fashion, my strong Christian faith, and above all else but the last of these, my feminism. Few if any of my friends and acquaintances will share each of those interests — but if I leverage my standing as a teacher and a blogger and a minor public figure through Facebook and Twitter to carry out the Great Commission of bringing folks towards these passions, then I think I’m doing something valuable.
(Many new ideas have come to me from my Facebook friends as well — the teacher can be taught, as it should be.)
And besides, it’s fun.
I like everything you like about it, although having people crawl out of the woodwork doesn’t ALWAYS feel comfortable. When the maintenance man where I went to college adds me it I don’t quite know what to do with that. I may just have every person I’ve ever met added by now.
Also, I wonder why it is that on MySpace, which I never use anymore, I was often approached by real or fake women who wamted to hook up or at least have me check out their porn site whereas that never happens on FB. I will say that if I were a band or a comic I’d prefer MySpace and I hope that FB will catch up in that regard.
And Twitter………….feh.
In any case, I am constantly reasessing FB’s Valuable Tool And Outlet/Brain Sofetening Timesuck ratio.
(Which reminds me, I just threw a wildebeast at you.)
I should add that I wasn’t close to the maintenance man and my reaction wasn’t because he’s a maintenance man.
As the kids today are saying…srsly.
Sometimes I like to make pretensions of this level of influence in my social networking, but there might be 5 or 10 people that read me in their feed regularly :-P For me it works in more of the opposite way. I add people like you or others who I respect and gain information and insight from them in the various things they post or reference. I feel select in that 150 you mentioned, lol.
The feed is also amazing. It is taxing to try and keep up with each individual consciously. That was the problem with MySpace, for example. To keep up with each person you’d have to visit each profile on a regular basis to check for updates, and who can do that? On the downside, I also feel that “the feed” feeds this lifelong voyeuristic impulse in me to observe others without being seen or having to interact with them myself. There are certain aspects of this in my life which I have had to consciously suppress, and their expression in the form of facebook has been a part of that process. However, it seems like any positive thing in life can be also be negative in equal proportion when handled the wrong way.
One annoying thing about people with a bazillion friends is that when I want to respond to some status of special interest, I end up being alerted 20 times in my email over the rest of the night when other people respond as well, hehe.
Funt Of A Thousand Faces:
I think this is rooted in the fact that facebook started as a very select social networking tool that required you to have a university email account in order to even sign up. Its popularity was in part due to its exclusiveness. Even though anyone can be on facebook now, much of its privacy organization is still based in “networks,” some of which are only attainable through having a particular kind of email account. If you’ve ever noticed, it’s a lot easier to access just anyone’s profile on MySpace than it is to do so on Facebook. This privacy probably discourages the spambots.
Personally, though, I always considered MySpace trashier, the drunken-one-night-stand-after-meeting-in-a-dive-bar in design and execution compared to Facebook’s exchanged-cards-at-a-business-function-followed-by-wine-and-dinner-date design and execution. I’m sure that description is just loaded with negative class and gender assumptions, but that’s the way it popped into my head.
jennyfields,
I don’t worry about all that the way Hugo does. Your description is fine with me.
Have you ever considered that Facebook is really a way for narcissists, evidently, such as yourself, to have a platform to splatter their figurative brain farts all over cyberspace? Honestly, why do you feel that others really care about your every thought that they choose to broadcast. Does anyone have boundaries anymoore? Do you?
The beauty of Facebook, Kelly, is that only those people who are my friends see these narcissistic brain farts. Those who do not wish to see them are free to remove themselves from my contact list with two key strokes.
Boundaries are good. Narrow provincialism, bad. Social networking allows folks to preserve the former and take a hatchet to the latter.
But I shan’t expect a friend request from you, Cockrell!