If you're reading this post, Facebook is not for you. Of course, if you're reading this post, it may be because you were referred from my Facebook page.
Yes, my friends, I am on Facebook and so are a lot of my other friends. And I use the f-word without quotes.
But an op-ed in the October 6, 2007, New York Times, The Fakebook Generation, by Alice Mathias says, in short, that us old people run the risk of missing the point. What's new there? I first became aware of how much of the point I was missing some years ago when I added an article to Phish and my daughters nearly expired from laughter. The and Phish do not a match make.
Ms. Mathias, a 2007 grad of Dartmouth College (and a very good writer), explains that Facebook is for fun and those of us who've joined since the floodgates opened to the AARP gen and their younger sibs this past spring may be delusional. Again, no dispute. The question remains: Can social networking sites a la Facebook and MySpace and who-knows-how-many-others actually offer anything of value to us working hacks?
Possibly. Frankly, though, I was shocked when the head of a software company, a contemporary, mind you, wrote me a note in early July saying that he hadn't found me on Facebook, that I apparently "wasn't into that." This was about the same time that I went to the meeting where I learned that Email is for old people (the young 'uns post for all the world to see, a point that Ms. Mathias makes). Advance the calendar another month and the head of a medical center invites me to be his "friend" on Facebook. Well, I like his blog so why not follow his lead to Facebook?
So off I go, feeling rather lonely as he was my only friend...for about two or three hours, whereupon I began to bump into all kinds of people I know, seriously, people I've known for years (or, in some cases, months), business colleagues, friends from the Internet wayback machine (hello, Howard, hello, Izumi), the nephew of a mentor whom I met some years ago (rattttther well known in publishing), and, of course, my 16-year-old godson, my 18-year-old nephew, and, yes, my daughter. And then people started "friending" me, people who saw my name on someone else's list of friends, people who'd read one of our books or had been to a talk I (or we) had given or some other flattering association.
All nice but useful? Well, in just a few weeks, I've been asked to write an article for a CIO publication, a foreword to a book, AND gotten help for another piece I've just finished for FreePint (thank you, David Coleman, Michael Sampson, and Loretta Donovan).
And I find myself feeling a bit silly from time to time as I ponder how many "friends" I have and consider adding frivolous widgets to my Facebook facility. How about you, my friends?
NB: Even The New Yorker has been reporting on Facebook. See Sept 17, 2007, Icebreaker Dept: Social Studies, which, needless to say, I blogged.
