Social Notworking

This evening — at the behest of my Brother-in-Law, I hasten to add — I joined something called Facebook, a social networking site that allows you to voyeurize all sorts of people whilst displaying your persona in a favourable light. Already I resent how manipulative and time-consuming it is, yet unlike my myspace (which I deleted after a couple of weeks), I may — god help me — give it a chance.

The ideal of social networking is that you will meet and find common ground with lots of interesting people, your career will be advanced, and you’ll get invited to lots of cool parties. The reality is that you get befriended by lots of people you mildly dislike yet feel obliged to friend back. It is a distraction, and one that rewards you for your inanity. The idea of displaying my feathers in such a way doesn’t appeal. Life is too short to be dealing with such trivia. As ever, one tries to imagine a Dr.Johnson or a Nabokov or a Schopenhauer joining Facebook . . . it’s wouldn’t happen.

Anyhow, the fact that I have joined would tend to suggest that it has jumped the shark, leading the cool people to discover another more exclusive networking site (they have, after all, previously exhausted Friendster and MySpace). At one point, I’m sure, even just being on Facebook was enough to be considered cool. No more! Even my Dad is on it.

The closest I came to truly enjoying social networking was after joining Livejournal, when I met all manner of interesting people, many of whom I now consider friends. What fuelled that initial burst of sociability, I’m not sure. Partly it was to do with the desire to get my webzine off the ground. That was certainly a good excuse. There was also the desire for a readership, one that would appreciate and comment on my blog posts. Either way, there was definitely an anxiety at the time, a need for validation. Nowadays I am comfortable in my own skin and don’t need instant validation.

Of course, if you do want to add me, I’m here.

Tweet Tweet

How much do I like Twitter? There is something terribly satisfying in being able to emit an idle thought so casually. Using the Firefox extension Twitterbar, I can publish my words in literally two clicks – it is so easy. There is no anxiety about formatting or links or comments or anything. All it amounts to is a few terse words.

I often dismiss the latest web technologies by saying, “oh, but can you imagine Dr.Johnson/Schopenhauer/Nabokov enthusiastically adding friends/posting lolcats/deleting their profile upon getting zero comments for a really personal post?” Conversely, with Twitter, I can quite easily imagine Samuel Beckett spending all day crafting his 140 characters into quietly tragicomic tweets or merely responding with the word “Nothing” to it’s eternal inquiry: What are you doing?

Talking of which, you may have noticed that I have updated this site, after launching it a few months ago with a design that looked something like this:

It was the simplicity of Twitter, where I can publish something in about three seconds, that inspired this new, pared down minimalist version. With the old one I had to make a 445 x 290 image for each post, resize a thumbnail for portfolio stuff, and hide categories from appearing where they shouldn’t (really pushing against the limitations of wordpress). With blogging, immediacy is essential — which is also why I include flickr photos, twitter tweets and delicious links (they update dynamically!) — and this new template should allow for fewer obstacles between me and the publish button.