October 23rd, 2009
Social networking. A now-ubiquitous term that conjures images of Facebook, nerds, and wasted work hours. These days, it seems you can’t enjoy a useful website without having to sign in, make a profile which reflects the person you’d like to be in the cyber world, and start spending your time networking, “friending,” and generally sucking up precious minutes connecting with other theoretical people. While I don’t mind having to sign into various sites, the social networking side of things starts to scare me off; as soon as I know I can have buddies, friends, or whatever-the-hell, I think about how much work goes into it, how little energy I actually want to exert on it, and how having a small buddy list makes you look inadequate and renders the whole thing pointless. Can’t I just post some videos online without seeing the dreaded e-mail that says “jdpstudman wants to be your friend?”
I’m generally in the minority on this from what I can tell. That social networking is a prerequisite for a successful site can only mean, I assume, that most people demand the feature in as many aspects of their daily lives as is possible. I’m not one to knock it as a concept, really; people can social network the shit out each other for all I care. And it’s not as though I take no part in it. I’m on Facebook and Twitter most days, and I enjoy reading the occasional witty status update or seeing photos of my friends’ recent drunken escapades. But I just can’t bring myself to fully embrace the extent to which it’s taken over our daily lives.
I also don’t want to log into ten sites a day just to see what funny YouTube videos people have posted. Because of this, I tend to lean toward just one social network at a time. For a while it was Myspace. I completely gave up on that and spent a lot of time on Facebook. Then I started appreciating the straightforward simplicity of Twitter even more than Facebook. What I use these sites for changes over time, but I really can’t handle more than one or two of them at any given moment. Maybe just one and a half of them.
