My friend Sarah and I were discussing our resistance to online social networking yesterday when she declared, "I'm a Conscientious Facebook Objector!"
Her genius concept sums up exactly how I feel.
But oh my the pressure is on. It's gone so far as people basically blackmailing me into joining. "Well I guess you'd know about X-Y-Z but you're not on Facebook." In some cases because I haven't joined, I've actually lost touch with people!
So just for the record, here are a list of reasons for my current disinterest in joining Facebook:
- I do not want to have to ignore friendship requests from people who are more interested in me than I am in them. Umm, no thanks. (I don't find that exactly genuine or authentic. And the cold hard truth is that there are some people if you give them your finger, they will bite you off at your elbow. These people are going to want more and more digital attention, like greedy cyber-starved pirahnas).
- I do not want to deny any friendship requests just as I wouldn't want any of my requests denied. Especially from people I could bump into in the future! Umm, again - no thank ya. How uncomfortable. (Flash back to asking if you could sit by somebody in the cafeteria and they said "No." How heartbreaking).
- By not wanting to deny anybody, I would therefore accept nearly everybody. Yet accepting friend requests of people you're truly not interested in gives them a window into your lives that you probably wouldn't otherwise offer. It's a boundary thing. Suddenly you find yourself in a situation where all these "friends" you've accepted have access to photos and private information about your life which you otherwise wouldn't have shared. Pretty soon, you're altering the content of your updates because you really don't want everybody to know X-Y-Z.
- And the number one reason I'm currently not joining Facebook: it's simply one more thing to manage and administer. I strongly suspect that Facebook would be just another giant time waster in my life. I don't want to spend the limited time I have expending energy into something that just ends up in a bunch of awkward interactions with folks I'm not genuinely invested in.
So that's it for now. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind and join up with the ranks of the rest of you networking gangsters. Anything is possible... but don't even get me started on Twitter!!
Fantastic post with plenty of food for thought. Sometimes keeping in touch the old fashioned way via telephone is best.
Arty hugs,
LD
Posted by: Linda | August 13, 2009 at 12:57 AM