Wood’s World

I realise that I’m about to comment on, and criticise in places, the social networking culture on a weblog. Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me. Therefore I will begin by specifying exactly what I am talking about in this article.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Bebo etc. The type of social networking sites which allow the user to have a profile page, which they can fill with pictures, comments about what they are doing, video’s etc.

You may ask - What’s the difference between that and a blog? That depends entirely on the blog, how it’s constructed, the purpose and most of all the content.

There are most definitely good things about these social networking sites. The main benefit for me is they allow you to stay in touch with people who may be on the other side of the world, or people that you wouldn’t normally see very often but you still consider good friends. They give you a convenient place to host your photo’s which can act as an extra back up – Recently two friends of mine had their apartment burgled, they lost their laptops and camera, they commented that thankfully they had their pictures uploaded on Facebook so they hadn’t lost them all in the theft. Sending messages over these social networking sites can be much easier than using email, because you have a comprehensive and visual ‘address book’.

What I don’t like about these social networking sites is the culture surrounding them, which leads to you hearing things like “that’s a good one for Facebook” when someone takes a photo, or when you sense that the main reason someone is taking a photo is to put it on their social networking profile. A friend of mine commented that it used to be better before these social networking sites came about, because when someone said they would meet you somewhere or be at some event, they would actually turn up because they didn’t feel they could easily fob you off via a non face to face or voice to voice communication i.e. an impersonal text message.

I recently came across this t-shirt design to the right on despair.com. An amusing Venn diagram which shows the three behavioral disorders driving the continued growth of some of the most heavily trafficked social networking sites. Although it’s meant as a joke, there is some truth in it.

Often the things that annoy people the most are things they disagree with or dislike seeing, that they know they are guilty of allowing themselves to get sucked into doing. Which is what inspired me to write this article. I sometimes find myself with some spare time and I end up on a social networking site, reading about how someone I haven’t seen or spoken to for 4 or 5 years “can’t wait to go and get drunk on Friday” or I see one interesting photo and end up trawling though the rest of the album. Afterward I always think to myself – What am I doing? This is a complete waste of time, why would I be remotely interested in someone being “all puffed out after blowing balloons up for rob’s birthday!!” I don’t even know who rob is. The time you waste doing these things (non of which you will remember in two days) could be spent on reading a stimulating book, or bettering yourself in some way, like learning to play the guitar for instance.

To stop myself falling into this trap which Facebook and the like set up for me, I’ve decided that every time I think about going on Facebook for no particular reason, I will instead attempt to make a contribution to my site, or pick up my guitar and mess about on it for a bit, or try to discover some new music to listen to. Anything to stop myself accidentally on purpose looking though another “night out in town” photo album with the same drunken pictures of people holding up alchopops.