MySpace, Facebook, & Twitter--Social Networking for What Purpose?

I have yet to discover what good comes of social networking sites. So far, these sites have been time-suckers of major proportion to me. Maybe it’s a generational thing, and young people need a different technology than the one older people have managed to figure out, so that they can feel younger, hipper and more cutting edge. I don’t know.

I do know they use these sites to tell about themselves, express themselves, post outlandish pictures of themselves as if to prove that yes, they DO in fact exist and are having a wonderful time at it, too, thank you very much. Personally, I don’t want that much information about myself floating around the internet. I’m certain that my face will end up on a fabricated body on some porn site. Or I will earn myself a deranged stalker who will for some reason take a dislike to my dog and my cat, and I’ll find the poor creatures trussed up and baked on a platter on my back porch. Seriously, I worry about these things. The whole ‘opening oneself up’ is clearly inadvisable in these times. Just read the news.

Then, there’s the whole political whacko issue you have to worry about. I intend to keep speaking my mind on various venues, and you don’t know what kind of religious and/or political retribution you might incur from some zealot. That’s not paranoia—it’s realistic care, if you know something about those people.

The whole idea of a million degrees of online separation seems bizarre, too. I am connected with people everyone else knows, and everyone they know. The sheer statistics of the occurrence of psychosis in any given society makes this a bad idea at its core. What are we thinking?

And yet, if you have anything to sell, anything to promote, it’s advised that you get on Facebook or MySpace. The risks of rubbing shoulders (no matter how remotely) with unwashed masses have always come in second to the prospect of making money. So I’m out there. In a limited way. Expecting chaos the whole time.

That’s the lure of technology, isn’t it? You just can’t NOT do it when you know it’s out there. It’s the thing that keeps Microsoft pumping out operating platforms that don’t particularly work. It’s the thing that keeps McCain hiring staffers to twitter for him (and yes, we do know McCain and others do NOT send tweets themselves—that strains credulity a little too much). It’s the thing that makes us spend hours hunched over a keyboard trying to download programs, endlessly writing profiles, and keeping secret logbooks of our online user names and passwords.

What hath God wrought? To coin a phrase.

The best that can be expressed about these new ways of interacting was said by a family member, when I asked her what these social networking sites were for. She answered, “I think they’re just another way to send email.”

That, at least, I can grasp.

If anyone out there has found a good use for social networking sites beyond that, please let me know. Until then, it’s out there, and I use it.
I have no choice.