I'm flooded by conflicting feelings (re: Facebook)

^This.

I've got kids now (well 1.5 at the moment). Even when my friends are local a lot of them are nurses working nights etc and it's too easy to lose touch. Facebook lets me see when they're planning a gig or night out or if a birthday is coming up and plan around going out with them that night.

People seem to think Facebook is an alternative to having "real friends" and "real get togethers". It's not. It's a supplement to them and lets you keep in contact casually with those you don't see for months (and plan when you will see them again). It's a lot more casual than making a phone, and more sociable too since ALL your friends can see the bit of news or planned get-together and decide to join in.

There's lots of things I don't like about Facebook such as privacy concerns and Farmville spam (both can be dealt with though), but there's lots of good and useful things about it as well.

If you don't like it grand, but don't assume its for losers "who have no real life friends" or a means for you to soley talk about yourself.

I don't Twitter, but I wish I'd invented it. Watching the ebb and flow of trends is more interesting to me than reading what people actually say on it (the metadata is more useful than the data IMO).

See, that's a lifestyle choice. Me, I'm never gonna' HAVE 118 friends because I don't WANT 118 friends. I don't know if I have 18. I had "friends" in primary school, whom I lost touch with, and I do not care. I still have one real friend from there that I see maybe twice a year, and occasionally play Battlefield 2142 with if we log on at the same time. I had a bunch of friends from high school (oddly, mostly girls), who moved to the capital to study in university. They eventually stopped writing, aside of organising the occasional class reunion, and I'm simply not going to bother writing to them any more. The one girl who did occasionally write to me is the one I keep in touch with, though. I have a bunch of friends from University, and while I like them and occasionally keep in touch with them, the most I can do with these people is go out to a restaurant, which as far as pleasurable activities go for me is somewhere between watching grass grow in winter and riding the bus home. I have a bunch of colleagues at work right now, including an Indian guy on a researcher exchange programme, but I spend enough time with them at work. I'm certainly not interested in "status updates" about their lives. If I were, I'd call them up and ask, which I have from time to time.

Maybe I'm a Luddite. May I'm just a hostile *******. Maybe I'm just a sociopathic dick. Point is, I don't really care about what other people are doing in their daily lives, even when it's interesting. I very much care about them when we're together in the same room, on the phone, in DIRECT chat or suchforth. I don't want to KNOW about them. I want to INTERACT with them. I don't want to feel like I'm surrounded by people that I'm not in the slightest close to. I want to feel like I'm actually tangibly interacting with these people. Frankly, even just one person is enough, as long as the interaction is real. I don't need to feel like I have many friends IN THEORY. I want to feel like I have a friend RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

This is kind of why I solo so much in-game, as well. I don't need a specific minimal body count before I feel like I'm having fun. I'm quite capable of doing so by myself. What I want out of other people is not their direct presence. It's having a person that's actually "in the room." That's why Facebook and Twitter and whatever else is out there for "social networking" is just never going to do it for me. You can have fun with it, guys. But please understand that I despise the very concept of it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Hmm... I come off as an introvert to you? Seriously? I mean, in theory I'd agree with you, but seriously? I have, like, eleventy billion posts and I've been called names by practically everyone who's held an account here. I think I've done well for myself

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You can be a real life introvert and forum extrovert. I am.

This, from probably the single biggest attention ***** on these forums?

I think I just broke a rib laughing.

Huh... You do have a point there. I don't believe I am, however, as I've been told so by a friend of mine (without me asking, even). What you see here on the forums is what you get, and yes, I really AM just this annoying and long-winded in real life, too.

Speaking of Facebook, by the way, I have a friend over right now, and lamenting to him about this topic (yes, I seriously do talk with other people about things on the forums, go figure), and while he DOES use Facebook, he too explained his annoyance at all the crap it was notifying him of. In fact, as we were speaking he was updating his list of things he didn't care about.

On the plus side, he did catch a friend of his posting about a black muscle-bound porn actress that we spent the next probably half hour looking up the name of. Good thing I knew about her, or he'd wouldn't have believed she was real.

Yeah, seriously.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I know, I should be drawn to them, right? But here's the rub. As a true attention *****, I DON'T use Facebook precisely BECAUSE it's filled with other attention whores jumping up and down and shouting "look at me!". You can't "stand out" when everyone else is standing out.

That's why I go on internet forums to feed my addiction.

Except no one I know uses FB to do the cyber equivalent of jumping up and down vying for attention. Apparently all of my friends and family are too mature for that.

I've had friends comment that they look forward to my posts because I make them laugh. Either because I found something online that was funny or because I'm a funny guy. My comments on people's photo albums seem to be especially prized. Friends of friends have commented how funny my comments are.

So while you view people on FB as attention whores, I'm out there literally saving the world simply because I care so damn much.

Was the irony between the first and second half of that sentence intentional? It MUST have been.

"Supplement" is an excellent way to put it.

Why have email when you could just call people? Why have a phone when you could just write a letter? Why write a letter when you could just go over and talk to them? Why learn to talk when you could just hit people with a stick?

One comment I heard in praise of Facebook was that it was good for people you know well enough to be slightly interested in their lives, but not well enough to write a lengthy email to "catch up" or exchange Chrismahanakwanzika cards with. I have those people in my life, known as "acquaintances."

I have a hard time imagining such a relationship, to be honest, but maybe I'm too polar for that sort of thing.

One thing this thread DID inspire me to do, however, is write a letter to a friend of mine who seems to have stopped writing. I should act responsibly about these things for a change. See if her marriage is going all right, at least.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.