If you read my post about facebook, you may get the idea that I dislike facebook and twitter. Just the opposite is true, however. Facebook is an invaluable tool that reminds me of everyone's birthday. Twitter can reach countless people as soon as some vital news breaks. The merits of social networking are many. The effects on our society are far-reaching, for the good and for the worse. I hate to see folks that have replaced real friendships with the virtual. I cannot stand those that preen over friend and follower counts. I received some emails- go figure- from a few people I know who read the post and took me to task for daring to be critical of social networking sites. "You just weren't cool enough to have a lot of friends..." they said. Au contraire! I had as many facebook friends as I wanted, and more so. I couldn't possibly keep up with 400 people any more than they could with 500, 600, 700, or 10,000!
It was just that smarmy sense of false self-worth they had developed from clicking "accept" so many times. It is so easy to establish a "network" of quasi-friends and online cronies. These people are little more than loose associations and symbiotic users who count you only as a tally on their "friend" count. At this stage in my life, I am only interested in building and fostering real and meaningful friendships. I no longer need the ego stroke of having a list of people that say they identify with me.
That being said, I wish I had thought of facebook or twitter. I would be a billionaire and could buy all the online friends I wanted! But seriously, these posts aren't a slam on facebook or those that still heavily use and rely on it for their interactions with friends. I personally feel that it would be silly for me to continue to devote my time to it, nothing more.
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