Half a Step Over

I  Have No Facebook Page…Nor Do I Tweet

Facebook has millions of members—or is that billions now? I even know some of them. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t feel a great need to post information about myself — this blog notwithstanding — nor do I want to post pictures that can come back to haunt me. And I’ve found that a number of people I know who do have Facebook pages don’t use them. They just felt obligated to have a page – register? – because their friends/acquaintances/children have them. But they never look at their pages, and postings are rare.

The question is really: Why do so many people feel that they have to talk about themselves so much, and comment on their friends’ lives? Is that really a productive use of time? Do we really need to “like” a store just to get coupons we won’t use, or constant notices on sales and specials?

A lot of people feel that we live too much of our lives in the public realm. I grant you that can be fun, provided it has a “fun” purpose. For example, when my older daughter was first engaged, she posted it to Facebook that night. By the next day, according to my younger daughter, 37 comments were posted to her “wall” (can anyone explain what a “wall” is to me; I’ve never figured it out). Apparently, that’s unheard of. I think it was terrific. Everyone was properly enthusiastic, although some of that probably changed when not everyone was invited to the actual wedding. But the mere fact that 37 people made comments was probably wonderful. In fact, by the time I had a chance to call my long-term friend to tell her about the engagement, she already knew. Her daughter had seen it posted and called her screaming the news enthusiastically. I felt cheated because I didn’t have the chance to trumpet the news myself, but I coped.

But returning to the question, why do we need to live online? After all, job seekers are now being warned to clean up their pages because prospective employers are looking to see those pages to make sure that their possible employees know how to behave. It’s something like getting that cute tattoo when you’re 18. Fifteen years later, it’s not so cute, and you’re visiting one of those tattoo removal places to get rid of what might now be an embarrassment. (I hear there’s a chain of tattoo removal sites in the Southwest that’s raking in money cleaning up old embarrassments.)

The Friends You Don't Need

And you can “unfriend” people. I didn’t know that could happen until my daughter asked me about it —and I don’t know why she asked me, since she knows that I have no knowledge of how Facebook works. It seems she had been friended by the new husband of an old friend. Then the “happy” couple got a divorce. Of course I said she could unfriend him. In fact, I questioned why she had ever allowed the connection since she hadn’t liked the husband from the moment she met him — at the wedding. It was a very easy call.

And let’s talk about tweeting. In my youth, that’s what birds did. Now, apparently, it’s important that we tell people what we’re doing all the time. I sometimes read online Twitter feeds. I find some of them fascinating. As an editor, I won’t even go into the spelling issues, although they make me crazy.

The Need to Tweet? 

I do understand the idea of a business being in Twitter. If you have a following, maybe you can enhance their knowledge of what you do. For example, my daughter’s husband owns a renovation company. For a while, they would periodically tweet information on basic home improvements, or what he was working on. It had a small following, they had fun with it. But unless you really spend time working on growing your audience, the benefits are limited.

And why do we need to follow the lives of celebrities? Are all of their lives so much better than ours? Does Lindsay Lohan really do interesting things? Did we need to know that Demi Moore was in a meltdown after Ashton Kutcher left her? And that now she has a new boyfriend, also much younger? Maybe if we spent a little less time following their lives, and a little more time on our lives, things would improve all over.

And that brings me to a last thought: I’m blogging. You might like what I write, but do you want to hear from me all the time? I don’t always have something pithy to say; a lot of my day goes to longer writings, or to other parts of my life, which I’ll probably eventually blog about. Besides, keeping my thoughts to 140 characters could be difficult.

So for now, no Facebook page—unless this blog really takes off and there is a huge demand for my thoughts. I still don’t know what I’d do with it, and I really don’t want a lot of pictures of myself out in cyberspace, but we can revisit this if I’m ever a huge success.