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Loading ...I have been a reluctant member of Facebook for going on about two years now. Of course this makes me the least popular person on my alma mater’s network because joining up well after graduation I’ve severely limited my number of friends. Why did I not join earlier? Very easy, I was just too cool. Now I find myself being ashamed of my low friend counts in certain global locations and hoping upon hope that I will have enough comments on my wall so as not to look silly.
Why did I cave in after holding out for so many years? It was hard holding back, especially when Facebook was so trendy secretive and new but I found it easier to stand strong as time went by. “I am too awesome to need finding,” was one excuse. However, after graduation I found myself logging onto my friends pagers more and more to find lost e mails, cell phone numbers, relationship statuses… and it just got ridiculous.
Since joining I have found long lost best friends, met up with buddies passing through the city and all kinds of convenient things of that nature. My new found admiration for Facebook was shaken at a very soggy British barbecue last night by a somewhat curt New Zealander who rose and interesting point. What if he didn’t want to be found? What if he didn’t have time for all the random people he’d purposefully lost contact with? He was planning a Facebook shutdown at the end of the week once he had gathered the emails of his closest mates.
Now this was an interesting development for me and perhaps, a glimpse into the future of the world of online social networks. It is hard to limit who can find you on these networks like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etcetera. Therefore is staying in touch with the people you probably already have in your address book (PDA, Blackberry, super-cell phone) really worth having to re-snub and get away from the people you worked so hard to lose contact with in the first place.
Another example of unwanted online availablilty of personal/contact information can be drawn from my own life. When I was teaching in a high school I had to disavow all knowledge of MySpace or Facebook at the risk of sounding tragically unhip in the hopes that my students wouldn’t root up my profile and I’d have to go through the trouble of not accepting them as friends, getting rid of any picture of me holding a beer or glass or wine, and turning my profile into a G-rated student friendly page.
What is the next step as more people become aware of these online networks? In this cas I mean more people that you don’t necessarily want being able to check out your latest evening out with friends on your newly posted album. Will networks need to find ways to become more private? Or will there be more people like the aforementioned New Zealander who just avoid the scene all together? There is no doubt that Facebook is here to stay but it’s interesting to know that there are people out there who want no more of it and I wonder if networks such as these have taken such scenarios into account.
Filed under: Conversation Marketing, Facebook, Social Networks
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You are too awesome to need finding.
Awww