Although I would never claim to be one of the pioneers of blogging, I have been known to vaguely suggest that I was part of the first wave of bloggers – or at least the second. Actually, forget that, I’ll start again…I was a blogger before the terrifying rise of social networking. Admittedly it wasn’t far behind me, but I can confidently say that when I was in my pomp I did not know a single person who used MySpace. In fact, I’m not even sure if it existed in any meaningful form back then.
Like everyone else though, I quickly succumbed. I became an active MySpace user and whittled away many happy hours with my small network of friends. This was also about the time I stopped blogging and, to be perfectly honest, a small part of me always resented this change in my online life. I knew deep down that I’d traded something unique and interesting for something that felt slightly, well, generic.
This resentment was conflicted though. MySpace was an essential factor in the bizarre story of how I met my fiancée, and Facebook has seen me back in contact with friends I always regretted losing touch with. As much I as I didn’t want to like social networking, I was certainly doing bloody well out of it. But now, many years and status updates later, Facebook feels stale and I can sense that old resentment bubbling up again…
It’s important to note that this relates to my personal experiences, and it’s quite possible that the time you spend on Facebook is infinity more fulfilling than mine. I should also mention that no meaningful data supports my feelings either. At the time of writing, this page was claiming over 300 million active Facebook users producing 45 million mildly interesting status updates per day. That’s some seriously big numbers!
But stats aren’t everything when it comes to these things. You wouldn’t try to gage how enjoyable a film is, for example, by simply counting heads in the cinema, you’d have to survey people for that. And so these numbers tell us nothing about the quality of people’s experiences on Facebook, especially mine.
There are rarely any new arrivals on Facebook for me now. The excitement of seeing a long-forgotten friend or co-worker suddenly appear is becoming increasingly rare. All I seem to get these days are requests off people I once knew who seem completely disinclined to communicate, preferring an inflated friend list to any real conversation. There’s also the large percentage of people on my friends list who rarely log on, if ever. I’m finding my interaction on Facebook now revolves around the same, fairly small group of friends. But rather than being a tightly-knit circle of my closer friends, they’re just the handful of people that use Facebook most. Our strongest connection is the combined hours we waste on the site, which I’m sure isn’t really the point of social networking.
I will admit that I spend a lot of time interacting with my girlfriend on Facebook though, time that is highly enjoyable. The honest truth, however, is that we tend to use whatever communication tool is nearest at the time. Google Chat, emails, text messages and old fashioned phone calls are all employed when we’re apart and fancy a chat. If Facebook winked out of existence tomorrow, I don’t think we’d unduly suffer. It might even help our predisposition towards procrastination a little.
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