Off the Mark

Seeing as I don’t often like being told to “Just do” something, I have taken my time coming to most social software.

First, I took up blogging in late Jan 2005 after reading quite a few for a while.

Flickr was second in Jan of this year.

I took up IM in April of this year after some of the lengthiest and most intense conversation on my blog after I asked, “IM, Why?” I followed that post up after much discussion with “IM? Here’s why!”

In late May I then took up MySpace [second post about it] because my son whom I had not been talking with for over 18 months invited me in to his MySpace to see his reply to something I had posted on my blog much earlier.

On Monday morning (2 Oct) I finally got a Facebook account. Why? Some of the newer students had been talking about it lately, the whole fiasco with them showing everyone everything, and then with them opening it up to everyone, and also watching danah boyd’s recent talk at UNC-Chapel Hill. All of these convinced me it was time to give it a try.

I really don’t have much to say about it yet. I doubt I’ll use it much the way it is described being used by typical aged college students [see EDUCAUSE report below and elsewhere]. It has some affordances, as one might say. Most of those affordances are not ones I need at this point in my life; many are ones I actively shun.

The Kept-Up Academic Librarian posted this morning about EDUCAUSE’s newest issue: “Seven Things You Should Know About Facebook.” I thought the timing was excellent. As usual, though, this piece told me nothing. I don’t mean to disparage EDUCAUSE here (I’ve given up on that), but this series has a limited but at the same time potentiallly huge audience—the clueless.

I have read several of the items in this series and I don’t know if there was ever a word/idea/thought in any of them that I wasn’t already aware of. Considering how clueless I am (in my opinion) about many of these things, I find that stunning. I have to wonder how many are really reading these things but, even more so, who is actually getting much out of them. That is, are they really reaching their intended audience.

Within the space of the “work week,” I already have almost as many friends on Facebook as I do in MySpace. Take out the one amazing cat and the 3 bands that are my “friends” [I have met and talked to 2 of them, though] on MySpace and the numbers are even closer. Remove my kids and half-sister and I think they’re even, although slightly different. That is, they are all people I go to school with, whether oncampus or LEEP.

There are some slightly interesting things going on, but not much that I wasn’t already aware of. I mean I already knew who was friendly with who. Again, I do see how some more could be going on wit hthe affordances that Facebook allows, but I don’t know how useful they will be to me.

At least now, when I hear people in our profession going on about how I have to be in these places because my patrons are I can honestly think, “Oh, shut up already until you have a better argument.” Because there are much better motivational arguments than “Just do it” and “Everyone else is.”

Now, I best get some homework done so I can go do some real social networking tonight. That is, go to the bar and talk in that good ol’ archaic way—face-to-face. With many of the people who are in my virtual social networks.

Me. Call me old, if you like. I much prefer the archaic way.