Facebook – what in the hell is going on there?

I am not even sure why but I signed up and joined the melee called Facebook a few months ago and have not stopped being intrigued ever since. I suppose I got on initially just to examine the phenomenon, to satisfy my profession curiosity, but then I got personally interested. In case you were wondering about my profession I work in television and radio and have the responsibility of making sure our technology strategy is continuously updated to include all the tactical efforts in infrastructure build out to provide the technical capacity that allows our producers to place their content, be it radio or television, or web in as many places as possible. Anyway back to the personally interested part. I was not signed up long at all, probably a day or two and already I was receiving friend requests. It has been interesting for me, people I had not seen or heard from in YEARS and in some cases A LOT OF YEARS were finding me. Then I started looking at them and their lists of friends and started finding even more people that I knew from some point in my life. Initially I was on a quest to get as many friends as I could, I think that is a common trend but I am not sure. I found my youngest brother and his wife, my middle brothers wife was there, my sister and two of her kids were there, people from my childhood, people from every place I served in the military and even more recent friends that I actually know and see now – they were all in here. I was friending away, later however, I would find that it was with reckless abandon.

In no time I was up over 150 friends and my feed was full of people’s lives as they scrolled by. I found myself taking friend requests from people I did not really like in real life and it did not take long for me to realize I still did not like them and their FB friendship was unnecessary and in one case offensive to me. One guy I served with in the Navy was a rabid hater, I remember he was a bigot, a racist and all around mean spirited guy when I knew him all those years ago. I did not hang out with him then and I realized I did not want to hang out with him now, BAM – he was dropped as a FB friend, it was that easy. I found that since I was checking in on FaceBook (FB from now on) only in the morning and evening that my feed would be so big I had to scroll back to look at older posts. It was either cut back on friends or start checking in more often, that was a dilemma. Having watched the behavior of my friends I could tell that this could easily become addictive and I did not need that! I was able to quit drinking, with direct guidance from military and quit smoking with my own will power I was not in need of any new addiction. Some of my friends were updating their status two or three times an hour, all day. Who has that kind of time and my life is relatively static anyway so I never thought I would change from twice a day. In no time at all I had pared my list of friends WAY down.

So after my friend list grew by leaps and bounds and then was unceremoniously pared back I was beginning to form some opinions about this social networking thing. It is not a new thing and has actually been built into our DNA from the start of time, whenever you believe that may be. A quick look through history will show ya, whether we humans were in the hunter – gatherer mode or acting like a settler we see groups of people banding together. In our early evolution we did it as a survival tactic and now that genetic tag is still working – we live socially. Just wanted ya to understand this social networking is not new, Homo Erectus got it all going for us on his trek to the top of the food chain. Several studies, such as Stanley Milgram’s “Small World Experiment have been conducted to empirically measure this social connectedness. While the exact number of links between people differs depending on the population measured and the types of links used, it is generally found to be relatively small. Hence, the phrase "six degrees of separation" is often used as a synonym for the idea of the "small world" phenomenon. Lots of studies have been done and are in progress even as we speak, the idea of an overall interconnectedness has been around long before Kevin Bacon made it a fun game. Buddhist’s have enjoyed a very detailed understanding of that interconnectedness for over two millennia and it seems everyone else is just playing catch up. Being an electronics wienie I pondered and compared this type of interconnectedness to the computer networks that are deployed today in many businesses and the interconnected nature of the internet. All things internet are loosely kind of based on a hardware and software version of the same principles. If you know how the internet works, behind the scenes you know what I mean. You might understand that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages, or packets, to anywhere in the world and its path will loosely follow the 6 degrees of separation principle to exploit the lateral diffusion of data traffic – opps slipped into techie geek there for a moment, sorry.

Anyway, that is academic really in the context of this conversation about FB. I formed an opinion, with the help of my real life friend Circe, that this FaceBook feed was a passively selective way to have a relationship with a friend. At first I was not sure if I liked it, I felt almost like a peeping tom and I felt very voyeuristic as I watched in fascination other people’s lives scroll past on my feed. I then realized that I could not be a peeping tom, not for that anyway, and it was not a voyeuristic way to have a relationship with my FB friends. The only information I was getting was what my friends wanted me to see about their lives. I guess in some cases my FB friends were real life people from different parts of my life and I was learning things about them that were previously unknown to me, some very interesting some not so much but there it was scrolling past on my feed. I began to realize that I could let my friends know more about me then they knew already, or maybe even more than they wanted to know. That was hard at first for me to accept, why would anyone not want to know more about me I thought? I thought that I was an open book, and I am to some degree, as those who know me will tell you - I will tell you the truth and speak my mind no matter the subject but in this case I realized I could expand on that. For those FB friends who may not know me as well, such as coworkers and others, they would get an insight into who I am and that may better help to understand why I am the way I am, or just unceremoniously dump me as a FB friend as happened in one case – he was a putz anyway. As I say in my in my FB profile “I am about as flawed a person as you will ever meet, I am at peace with that so it does not bother me, or more importantly it does not bother my Bride either”. I found I really liked being on FB and the friendships I have started in some cases and restarted in others and in a few ended.

I have purposely not gotten involved in any of the extraneous applications and external gadgets. Things like Mafia Wars, which my poor friend Mark has been eaten up with the dumbass on, I even tried to hold an intervention in here with his other friends but we have lost him to the addiction. I am laughing Mark – he reads this blog. There are many others, a few of my friends are virtual farmers and that is OK but it is not for me, I spend enough time in front of computers at work and do not need any need virtual hobbies – I like the real tangible hobbies (that is for you Rob). I also have not gotten involved in the Hugging and pieces of flair, I do not want to know which Star wars character some demented software application thinks I am, I do not need an application to tell me where I should live, I do not want my life evaluation performed by a computer and I do not need some crazy persons software to diagnose my mental disorders. So I guess I am saying that if you have asked me to farm or wanted me to join your mafia family or any other of the other things I reject those requests, not because you are not my friend but because I have set limits to how much of my life will be invested into “playing” on the computer. I love ya mean it!!!

Facebook has allowed me to document little moments of time in my life for others to see, but more importantly it is for me. Some things in life are hard and being able to talk about those situations with my Bride has been the best thing in the world for me. Being able to write my thoughts down and have others read and comment, or ignore has helped me in other ways. I started my blog, Mr. Oatmeal’s Oratories, as kind of a platform for me to express whatever I was thinking about, some might say that in some Freudian way that I was trying to reconcile my Mom’s final battle with Althizemers – who knows and more importantly who cares, not me. I have shared my feelings about all sorts of topics from the stimulus plan to the death of my Mom to using as seen on television products. I have been asked how many people read my blog and ya know what, I did not put a counter on my site on purpose, I don’t really care I am not doing for anyone else, it is for me and if people read and enjoy – good, if not – that’s good too. I have decided I like Facebook and all it has allowed me to do and I like all the new friends I have started relationships with and the ones I restarted a relationship with and the real life friends that I have learned more about.

Face Book - whuddathunkit?