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Fear of Facebook

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on November 8, 2008 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

It’s not that I don’t love the virtual you, I just prefer the real one…

Someone please absolve me of my FaceGuilt. As an addictive person who works on a computer a lot (am I addicted?)  and is very social and very networked (Malcolm Gladwell would call me a “Connector”), social networking sites present me with a terrible dilemma. Log in and lose several hours of my life, or not log in and have long-lost friends think I’m a jerk. I’ve opted for the latter most of the time. Although many of my friends are a-Twitter, I still find that I’m not interested in what on-line game my friends have been playing for three hours, whether or not they’re spanking me, or how many requests to plant imaginary ginger plants are backing up in my account. Please, I have e-mail, I have two phones, and a mailing address…if you really loved me, you’d just CALL or send REAL flowers. This goes double for people who participate in on line communities like Second Life; my take has always been Get a First Life. BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG. I don’t sit in judgement; I once spent an hour-and-a-half playing Stack the Cats, for chrissake. There are other reasons to avoid FaceBook though. You may have seen this YouTube clip that practically implies that FaceBook is an NSA project or something. Never mind that level of paranoia, there’s no tin foil hat necessary. FaceBook can get you murdered or at least beaten unexpectedly. Why risk your life? I jest of course; for me it’s really about time management. Which is why a site like atomkeep.com cracks me up. Sure. Set up another account to manage all the others. Kind of like the counterproductive act of spending all your time managing all your time in Excel.

Lifestreaming: Bored With Your Life? Live Someone Else’s

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 22, 2008 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Lifestreaming – New Web Services make “Being John Malkovich” possible.

Burnt out on social networking sites? Alright, all you MySpace/FaceBook addicted luddites. Get ready for the next big thing you’ll get tired of next year: Lifestreaming. [My apologies to any readers who prefer real life to spending a few hours a day updating their FaceBook page. Just stop reading right now.] Big Brother probably never expected people to actively, even EXCITEDLY share their whereabouts not only in the past but in real time, now. I couldn’t possibly put it better than Damien Mulley, a blogger and writer for Ireland’s Sunday Tribune, who describes lifestreaming as: “…a dream come true for those that gloriously show off every facet of their life and the millions of lurkers who are willing to tune into such dross…Lifestreaming, like the movie Being John Malkovich, will allow you to climb inside the head of someone and experience their day via a digital smorgasboard of public text messages, blog posts, GPS-tagged photos and…a live video stream of them as they move around their world…” Yikes. It’s a little less dramatic than this of course. A simpler use of “lifestreaming” or “lifecasting” sites was well-explored in the Internet Meme timeline on Read the rest of this entry »

FaceStat: “Hot or Not”, With Adjectives

[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 25, 2008 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Let other vain people you don’t care about judge you by a photo that you upload, and get statistics that are about as useful as a Fox News viewer poll.

Are you a FaceBook user? Tired of making friends with friends you’re already friends with and asking them to plant imaginary plants for you? Maybe you should try FaceStat. It’s sort of like drive-by social networking. You only need an e-mail and a photo, and you’re off. The objective: judge others’ photos and let them judge yours. I made the mistake of using a real photo of myself, and offering honest judgements. Five hours later, all I had learned was that: 1.) I’m Definitely Straight AND Definitely Gay; 2.) I Need a Haircut; and 3.) People are just plain mean when they’re given the chance. I was pretty amused when a couple of women started insisting I looked like Tim Gunn, and that no, really – that’s okay. My “Word Cloud” by now consisted of “creepy”, “RISKY”, “wipped”, and “old”. That was it. All the results still weren’t in (the site said it would take about three hours, and it had been nearly six now) and already, people who’ve never met me were calling me creepy. Meh. Two can play this game. I went after male users first, because I’m intelligent enough to know (in spite of my low FaceStat intelligence rating) that men Read the rest of this entry »

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