Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Booking my Face

I already spend too much time on the computer. But I keep being told my family (especially my dear husband) that I need to get my own Facebook account. When appropriate, like sending a Happy Birthday to my niece two minutes ago, I steal Jason's.

Tonight Cami asked me to tell her a story about people I know, but she doesn't. I decided to tell her about the boy who lived next door when I was her age. And then I decided to look him up on Facebook. Through his page, I found tons of other people I haven't thought about in years. Funny how I haven't missed them. (Not so funny -- but stroking my bruised ego -- I've aged much better than most of them.)

Anyway, what do you think? Do bloggers & Facebookers mix?

8 comments:

Sarah said...

I'm on both but haven't done a lot with facebook. I have enjoyed looking at a lot of former friends that I haven't been in touch with. Starr, just jump in. You don't have to be an active facebooker. There are a ton of TS sisters, Prez, the whole bit.

There are some things that I wish you could do with facebook that you can't and some things that bug me, but overall it is a really useful convenient thing. I really have connected with a lot of former friends that I probably wouldn't have otherwise...

emily said...

They sure do! For me they are two different worlds. Facebook is amazing in finding people you never thought you would!

Camps said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Camps said...

I actually just had to articulate my own philosophy on Facebook (and why I refuse to use it) to some colleagues. I'll plagiarize myself:
Facebook is the frontier between my tactics of resistance and the dominating strategies of socially focused technology tools.

*hat tip to Michel de Certeau*

In less theoretical terms, I find the combination of privacy concerns and content ownership wrangling to be entirely too Orwellian for my taste. Plus it's a big fat waste of time, which doesn't help.

Marie Rayner said...

I do both Starr. I Love blogging, but I also love my facebook. It's my favourite way of keeping in touch with friends and family.

Anonymous said...

Hey Starr! I do both and love it!
i am able to keep in touch with friends from New Jersey, and our home ward, I just set Lynn up with his own account and he is able to keep in touch with his whole family from louisiana, and niece in Iraq. I look forward to the little comments I get on facebook, sometimes they are just what I need to make my day.

Cynthia Camp said...

Alas, another naysayer, but I personally do not see the attraction in (a) having my every move trackable by vast numbers of people, (b) hunting down people I haven't thought of in years (after all, there's a reason I haven't thought of them), and (c) wasting yet more time online.

That probably says more about me than about the technology, though.

At the same time, my fear is that Facebook fosters the sense that you really "know" someone just by what they choose to post, thereby engendering very surface, facile relationships often masking as something more substantial. Which can then too easily lead, in other forums, to misprisions and nastiness.

Am I paranoid? Maybe, but even paranoids have enemies. :)

Jason said...

"Misprisions"? Please, sister 'o mine -- there are children present!