Five.
I especially liked this:
A newspaper columnist once told of her shock when, having struck up a rapport with a man over dinner, she was told at the end of the meal he had no vacancies for friends. He was operating a “one-in, one-out” policy. Six months later she received a card stating he was now available for friendship.
There’s a lot of fretting about Facebook in England these days, because it is creating attention-deficient friend-flators. When Henry announced that he had joined and pressed the rest of us to, someone criticized him for assuming that it was reaching a critical mass just because he, and his friends, had joined. I, by contrast, assumed that it was about to go belly-up because I had joined (I’m the classic late-adopter, as evidenced by my recent desperate bulk-buying of cassette tapes and tape players before they stop making them because the rest of you have started using ipods). That was a while ago, but I’ve got to tell you that its days are now definitely numbered, because not only has my wife joined but, worse, I just became friends with the mother of one of my secondary school friends.
{ 12 comments }
JoB 03.03.09 at 3:41 pm
Five is about right: four and one spare.
The interesting thing about early adopters is that they tend to support the Dalaï Lama but at the same time uncritically force everybody to take a google account completely uncritical of google caving in at the Chinese government every time some under-vice-minister’s aide has an issue.
Peter 03.03.09 at 4:19 pm
There’s a big difference between real-life friends and Facebook “friends.”
Kieran Healy 03.03.09 at 5:12 pm
There’s a big difference between real-life friends and Facebook “friends.â€
Which ones are always asking you for money again?
JB 03.03.09 at 5:25 pm
To quote a facebook friend who claimed that it jumped the shark:
“No, it totally just did for me. My landlord just sent me a friend request.”
To quote me in the same thread:
“my landlord’s wife is one of the most frequently updated accounts i track…”
You be the judge.
TW Andrews 03.03.09 at 7:40 pm
For me, Facebook is essentially a self-maintaining address book. Any social value it has is pretty minor.
mollymooly 03.03.09 at 11:33 pm
I love finding out which of my acquaintances have just completed the liquor smuggling in Mob Wars.
skippy 03.04.09 at 2:55 am
i just joined twitter earlier this week to see what all the brou-ha-ha was.
actually i had followed a link from my sitemeter traffic index back to a twitter tweet mad kane posted about my blog…so i decided to try it.
it’s pretty damn boring. but i can see why all the tv pundits and journos just love it…
there’s no dialogue whatsoever…it’s just people talking at each other, w/o actually engaging.
John Quiggin 03.04.09 at 3:19 am
I remember hearing the identical story (with genders reversed) from a colleague.
CK Dexter 03.04.09 at 2:08 pm
“there’s no dialogue whatsoever…it’s just people talking at each other, w/o actually engaging.”
Exactly. The funny thing is that Twitter has already been invented. It’s called texting. I mean the blog. I mean the cell phone.
Lisa 03.05.09 at 2:59 am
Facebook is made for academics. It requires so little of you. Someone writes a line and then you can wait 10 hours to reply.
salient 03.05.09 at 3:43 am
there’s no dialogue whatsoever…it’s just people talking at each other, w/o actually engaging.
Yes, but when we start seeing Presidential campaign debates conducted via Twitter, this characteristic will become a thing of incomprehensible beauty.
Rana 03.05.09 at 6:28 am
there’s no dialogue whatsoever…it’s just people talking at each other, w/o actually engaging.
Well, that’s how some people use Twitter, but that’s not how you must use Twitter. I belong to a circle of interwoven followers and followees, and it’s more like a virtual coffeeshop than a series of monologues – we all reply to each other and read each others’ replies. It’s like chat, yes, but without the anxiety of it all having to take place in real time (a serious consideration when most of us are in separate time zones).
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