Facebook! Twitter! My wife says I should get a Facebook account. Why? So she can “friend” me? She already made the ultimate sacrifice, what is my being on Facebook going to do for her? And Twitter? I don’t need to see more examples of laziness in spelling and grammar in 140 characters or less. Besides, I can’t work up enough energy to care to be that narcissistic or chatty. I also don’t care how sites – including WordPress – and television shows try to push the whole Facebook and Twitter thing down my throat. Can anybody write a sentence without jamming “@” or “#” before a name or subjective noun? Geez!
Need some friends? Go outside and get some. Because you can get a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million friends on Facebook and very few of them are really your friends. They are just names (and probably made up) and will drop you as easily as they added you. The ones who are your friends probably were already your friends!
I have two WordPress accounts, two YouTube accounts, a Newsvine account*, a LinkedIn account, and two deviantART accounts – none of which I maintain with any measure of diligence. Add the fact that I have my own website and I dropped my former MySpace account, and you may be able to see that Facebook and Twitter have no value whatsoever in my little slice of the universe.
So why do I put this here? Because here I can actually write whatever I want to say in a proper form, just like an essay, just like a newspaper article and it’s there for all the world to see – or not. If I give anyone pause to consider a topic, great! If someone actually wants to read me, even better – and thanks! But my thoughts would be here regardless; no affirmations, no “friending” necessary. And I am not so self-absorbed that I think anything I write here could actually change someone’s mind – I think the internet is a lousy way to do that. But I can do whatever I want without the added burden of Facebook or Twitter.
Besides, it’s more fun for me to patrol the internet and find things on my own.
*Dropped since the writing of this article. I don’t miss it one bit.
Terms of Digression 