The Great Social Experiment
Ok – I know I’ve been slacking on the blog updates. Sorry about that. But I’m back.
And to start us back up, I’m venturing into the world of “social networking“. Yes, at long last, I will have a Facebook page!
You might be wondering what the big deal is. Why wouldn’t I have had a Facebook page already? I’d actually registered a year or two back – just to see what was going on, but had never even filled in my profile. There are a few reasons that I held out this long:
The “Ick” Factor- For the longest time, I still thought of Facebook as a place for high school and college kids. When they fisrt started Facebook, you couldn’t even join unless you were a student with a “.edu” email address to prove it. That was still my perception. And and when I heard my contemporaries talking about having a Facebook page, I still thought that a middle-aged guy with a Facebook page would make me look like a creepy schoolyard stalker.
I Have Enough Friends – I kept hearing stories about rediscovering people from you past. My 50-something sister re-connected with high school friends from over 30 years ago. People found friends who had moved or relatives they’d lost touch with. Maybe it’s just me, but I already stay in touch with the people I want to keep in my life. I have no room for re-adding old friends and do I really need to exchange photos with third cousins that I haven’t seen since my bar mitzvah?
What Do I Do When I Get There? – OK – so I put up a page, post a picture of myself and tell a bit about my life. And swarms of friends, relatives and kindred souls find me. Now what? If you weren’t invited to my Labor Day BBQ, why would you want to see pictures of it? There’s the Twitter-like “What I’m Doing Now” function, but again, if you haven’t seen me in 20 years, do you care that I just got back from the liquor store? (Of course, if you’ve known me that long, you’d know that a trip to the liquor store isn’t really breaking news…)
So, despite my reservations, I put up a page, responded to the long-ignored “friend” invites and lit the fuse. The invites have already started to pour in. So we’ll go through this together. We’ll look at who found me, try and figure out how they found me, why they reached out and maybe you can help me figure out what to do now that I’m “connected” to these people…
Richard, you’re a cynic… Just because you don’t SEE those third cousins doesn’t mean they don’t think about you once in a while, and hearing about their lives jus might be interesting… It’s called networking for a reason. Perhaps someone from high school is now involved in an industry that might be beneficial to you professionally. Maybe there’s a long lost love interest out there who lives in a neighboring town and they are looking for a relationship too… You only put in as much time and information as you have “room” for… Slow down and give the networking thing a chance… Maybe you’ll discover something you’ve forgotten about yourself too.
[...] as part of the grand experimment in social networking, I’ve been on Facebook for over a week. I have 32 “friends”. Some of those people have over [...]