Facebook Limitations

Friday 19 June 2009

I walked the several blocks to my Christian meditation group last night (you can read vague references to it - insert cross-promotional link - here).

On the way, I noticed, coming towards me, one of my Facebook "friends". I have a funny feeling she noticed me too.

We walked right past each other :D

++++

Edit: I'm a bag of laughs, aren't I, hey, wot wot? Every post a drear and dark whingefest of whingeing :) But hey, whaddaya expect from a lonely seasonally affectively disordered woman who is just about impaled on the solstice? Come back in Spring, I'll be gushing geyserly by then :)

8 comments

  1. hmmmm
    and people think i'm mad cos i quit facebook!

    if people really want to be 'friends' there is email, phone, post, and the old fashioned face to face over a cup of coffee . . .

    if they haven't bothered to do that in the past 12 months, what kinda friend are they

    the lurking, stickybeaking, want to know what everyone is doing with no personal emotional investment kind of friend

    meh - who would've thunk i like winter
    but i hate facebook

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  2. Yeah, Kel, I quit it too ... and then started it up again.

    I really have such a love/hate relationship with Facebook, with the internet as a whole. It makes me paranoid. So much smoke and mirrors. Such intimacy at such little cost. So difficult to know what people really mean. I think I need an internet fast at some point. Trouble is, I'm an addict.

    I also need some vitamin D. And some St Johns Wort. So I can keep loving Winter. Went into the health food shop at Melbourne Central saying, "Help me get through winter without killing myself!" :)

    I'm glad you like Winter :) I like all of the elements of it except the depression and the insane sleep patterns.

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  3. Love the change here Sue! Wonderful colors! You are so creative!

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  4. SO then unfriend everyone who wouldn't speak to you if you were to see them in public. Facebook has its evils, for sure, especially the "friend" pressure thing. I just find it nice because so many of my friends are scattered, and there they are all in one place.

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  5. the salesperson in the health food shop could have had a field day with that request :)
    hope you got what you needed and can face the cold/dark months with a smile

    erin, you're right :)
    facebook is a great gathering point when friends and family are from far and wide, and that's why I got onto it
    in theory 'unfriending' people or not 'friending' them to start with sounds good, but in reality it didn't go down very well (in my experience anyhow)

    but apart from the artificial 'friend' pressurised atmosphere, the deciding factor for me to quit facebook was the security compromises, all those applications any "friends" have on their profile, have access to your information - even if you have your account set to the highest privacy settings

    if you have friends who don't add on all those applications, then it's not a problem, unfortunately most of mine had so many apps on their profile . . . my computer had two rebuilds during the time i was on facebook: as soon as I deleted everything on facebook and quit the account, everything settled down, enough said . . .

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  6. Ahh, I see. That hasn't been my experience (security issues) but that's certainly not saying it couldn't be your experience. And nevertheless I hate the friend pressure. This one guy keeps trying to friend me, and I keep ignoring him, and he never gives up. (I don't think it's just me, I think he tries to friend a lot of people). I have no freaking idea who he is, and no desire to "friend" him. And all the people who make requests where I think "meh" and could care less, but struggle with feeling unfriendly. It's so much pressure.

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  7. I have found a lot of friend requests are 'shotgun' theory ones where everyone in someone's address book gets asked to be a friend. I replied via email turning down a couple of them cuz I don't use FB much only to find the requests hadn't been 'specific' to me.

    Bloody nerve!!

    Primarily it's a tool to keep up with my distant kids and extended family (+ a couple of blog-buddies).

    FB did go through a stretch of a couple of months where it was acting very wonky and I thought of ditching it too. Might yet...

    BTW Sue - my comments never go through on the first attempt (???)

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  8. Nicole - thank you!! This is a template made by someone called Lena (link at bottom) so I can really only take credit for some of the colour change tweaks.

    Erin and Kel - my friend John and I had a long (face-to-face) discussion last night about the evils of the internet and Facebook pressure and how it is great as a tool but how it seems to be easy for some people to cross over and mistake being online as being more real than it actually is. It was an interesting discussion and I had some interesting feedback too from him and Jane about why they don't read my blog, which I think I shall blog about! :) (It's only right).

    Interesting thoughts about security issues, Kel. I ditched Facebook partially for that reason the first time. When you go back and see who actually "owns" Facebook, and that they own the contents on there, it can be a bit scary. But my main contentions with it are philosophical. Yet another soundbyting ourselves down to something that needs to sell itself, that needs an avatar, that can't have any ongoing sort of conversation about anyting because we're all too fucking ADHD to keep up. But then, again, as a tool, in a general way, it's a great thing.

    Norm - that's strange that your comments don't go through on first attempt. That shotgun theory of friending - that sucks. Do people really feel better about their lives because they have 500 Facebook friends??? That's so weird a thought, isn't it.

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