<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 7:43 PM, Richard Bronosky <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Richard@bronosky.com">Richard@bronosky.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<p>I don't know if anyone else is seeing the irony in this discussion. Insisting that people send you personal emails, dedicated phone calls, and visits to your home is narcissistic. The reason facebook is so popular is that people can make the events of their lives available to their friends and loved ones even when the event is not significant enough to warrant a phone call or email. I would feel like a narcissist if I emailed my contact list every time my daughter did some thing cute or I had a great new beer. But, with facebook (via twitter in my case) I just put it out there and the interested people can choose to get caught up with me when they please.</p>
<p>If you are refusing to use facebook and you have adult children that want you to use it, you are missing out if you don't. They will have dozens of times over the year where they wanted to share something with you but didn't because they couldn't take the time right then to craft the right words to make right how long it's been since they last spoke to you. I know that's not what you intend, but that is the position you are putting them in. The holidays are a great time to get over yourself. You'll have a better 2011 if you do.<br>
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<p></p><br clear="all"></blockquote><div>To me, "communicating" through facebook is like talking with a friend by renting a billboard on a private road. Maybe I don't understand why someone would feel the need to share the little details of their life with everyone on a private road. <br>
<br>Maybe I don't like the use of the word 'friend' when most people are really just acquaintances. It also feels rather creepy keeping a voyeuristic perspective on a bunch of people that I don't meet face to face.<br>
<br>I met up with a colleague from grad school after many years. That was fun catching up. I lost contact with everyone from high school. They don't matter enough to me to make enough of an effort to reconnect. It's not like I've been in hiding. My parents have been at the same address since 1964. I haven't moved in the past 19 years. <br>
<br>But slap an AJAX interface on it and suddenly I'm a curmudgeon for not wanting to share all of my innermost likes and dislikes on a billboard on a private road so people who are too lazy to find me for the past 30 years suddenly can start sharing how often their pet farts with me and the other 200 "friends".... <br>
<br>no thanks.<br><br>If I have to filter information flow, that's the stream I want to tune out. <br><br>Add to it I don't care to swap marketing data for a free AJAX interface to post crap on and read other people's crap. It would take to much time away from making snarky comments on the ALE list :-) <br>
<br></div></div>-- <br>-- <br>James P. Kinney III<br>I would rather stumble along in freedom than walk effortlessly in chains.<br><br><br>