Monday, July 20, 2009

The Facebook FEN-omena

Can someone please explain Facebook to me? At first, I thought it was another MySpace, which I find not only difficult to use, but not worth the effort to keep up with. (Obviously I'm not working enough with it to uncover its potential.) Facebook is so popular now. My teenagers have it. My husband has even jumped on the bandwagon, and now is in contact with a few friends he went to high school with.

Do you use it? Do you find it taking up a lot of your time? See, this is what concerns me. I'm already struggling not to check my emails and surf the web when I should be writing. Do I really need to give myself another reason to avoid my characters? Or am I missing out on a good thing?


Some say you can network with it, but do you? Or is it some chatty thing? I'm not that technologically challenged, but I'm not keen on jumping on trends. Twitter still eludes me. But Facebook is looking like a networking/friending opportunity I should look into.

Any thoughts on this topic would be helpful. Thanks!

2 comments:

Elle said...

Personally, I'm not on ANY of the social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter etc) because I've seen how much trouble they can cause by just listening to my co-workers. I can definitely see how these sites can work for a public figure (like, say, an author?), but at a personal level I'm more concerned with putting too much information out in cyberspace. Ironic, I know, considering I write a blog, but I've taken great pains to keep my blog private from my professional life.

Maybe I just worry too much, eh? I suppose it just depends on what you hope to get out of the site and how much time you're willing to put into it. From what I've observed, it's more addictive than email and I know people who think nothing of spending hours at a time searching for people they know... to re-connect. I've got plenty of other things to occupy my time so I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything vital by not participating with this online craze.

Marie Harte said...

I'm with you, Elle. First of all, I'm always conscious of how much personal information I share with others on the net. Most folks are sincere, but there's that 1% of crazy out there.

Then too, I really need to avoid anything that sucks too much of my time. Since I have little of it to begin with, I try to use it either to write or promote--and half the time I look at promoting as a waste of time because I'd rather be writing.