I have just responded to two blog posts today about different aspects of Facebook. I think it is time I talk about it here. I don’t normally address Facebook for a very simple reason.
I hate Facebook. Really.
Facebook, to me, is high school all over again. I was not popular and didn’t get to hang with the incrowds. In fact, I was worse than a nerd. I was smart, I moved around a lot, I was always the new kid, and teachers LOVED me. You can’t put a bigger “loser” target on someone in high school. So I was basically a loner, always on the outside, and not really interested in looking in.
Thank god I got to graduate and move on.
But here I am, *mumble* years later, and it is happening all over again. Will you friend me? Can I be your friend? Ack. I have no patience with that. I’m used to people not wanting to be my friend, so you go your way, and I’ll go mine, mmkay, pumpkin? But as ironic as it gets, I find myself in social media, and we come right back around to friends.
Let me be clear: I think Facebook does have a valid use, and I also know a lot of people who cannot live without checking their profile multiple times a day. Good for them. It doesn’t float my boat, but I certainly don’t condemn them for their preferences (much). It seems to me that it’s very high schoolish, and as I pointed out, that’s not really a place I want to go back to. I’m not linked to any high school friends, I don’t have extended family on Facebook. I have no real way to connect with the memes, the games, the applications, the poking, the wars, the farms, the moods, the drinking photos, the tagging–in short, most of what everyone else is on there for. In case of point, I offer a very well-written blog post by Tim Nekritz that illustrates the electronic sheep mentality of Facebook, and my response why it doesn’t trip my trigger.
So why am I even on Facebook? Three reasons:
- I’m a tech geek. I’m curious about everything, and I always sign up for the latest thing so I can kick the tires and decide for myself whether or not it is useful to me, or if there’s something that performs the same function for me, only better. (Also, please note: I joined Facebook back when you had to be in college to join. Yes, I’m “that old”.) I tried it, it didn’t do it for me, and I tried to move on.
- I have non-tech friends who use it as their preferred method of staying in touch, and they want me to be a part of their community. In this instance, it is clearly not about me, but I want to respect that for them, it’s how they roll. So I stay on. (Sigh.)
- Others use it. Others want to know how to use it. It’s my job to help others use social media and technology, and it means however I feel about it personally, it can be used effectively in creating community and in teaching and learning with technology. So I stay on.
Clearly, I pay more attention to other forms of social media than I do to Facebook. Not to totally ignore them, I linked my Twitter feed into my Facebook updates. This way, I don’t have to show up on Facebook, but “those people” still get updates into my life. Yeah, there might be references they don’t get, but at least they don’t see @ responses or DMs, so in my mind, it strikes a happy medium.
But now I’m not so sure. Enter today’s second blog post by Rachel Reuben that warns against that very linking behavior. Well heck. Here I was thinking I was doing a good thing. Worse, she may have even convinced me to unlink it and pay a bit more attention to my Facebook peeps. I really don’t want to waste 3 characters on Twitter to do selective posting to Facebook, but I’m actually going to think about it. Because you guys keep sucking me into the Facebook vortex, and I’m just too exhausted to fight the stream. But keep that farmville stuff to yourself, or I’ll send the mafia wars crew out to hunt you down and shoot your pigs. Or something.
Apparently, sometimes even I do a social media faceplant.
I am a firm believer that use of social media — frequency or even avoidance of same — is a personal choice and there are no right or wrong answers. Some people think I preach use of social media, but I moreso preach at least trying out the various platforms and avenues. My Facebooking, at least as an individual (as opposed to institutional), is less frequent than my Twittering because — as you put it so well — it feels like high school sometimes. And heck, I didn’t like high school either. Don’t know many people who did.
I’m with you Robin. I hate facebook.Even more. The idea of joining a lifetime high school type reunion with the world, ye gads. I’ll do it eventually. My daughter has agreed to be my only friend. I joined Twitter for the TLT Symposium to see if it would add flavor. After ten minutes, I was really bored. And then twitter suggested I tweet about what I was doing, umm, looking at twitter. So I’m not sold yet. I see Facebook as the institutionalization of the personal. They own you. I think Robin, one day, I’ll have to ask for your help about this matter. How do I do it? More importantly, I’ve been wondering about how to integrate more social media platforms into the classroom, making it real worldish.