Sorry, Hamid and Inge…Thoughts on Technology

Hamid Bubajari would like to be my friend on Facebook.

I was notified of this today via email, and asked to confirm that yes, we could be friends, or no, I’d rather not. I chose no response and just deleted the email. There’s a couple of reasons for this:

Number one, I have no earthly idea who Hamid Bubajari is.

Number two, I delete all notifications of this kind that I receive. I’m on Facebook, but the profile picture is taken of the back of my head (I happen to be sitting on a beach, so it’s rather a head and shoulders shot of a ponytail and a baseball cap) so how could anybody even know it’s me, and the name in the profile, left largely blank, is fake. Not because I’m dishonest and want to masquerade behind a faux Facebook persona, but simply because the only reason I joined the site was to read the message boards for my HOA and keep up with the doings of the board. Facebook, in that regard, has been much more informative (and far less sleep-inducing) than any HOA meeting I’ve attended in the three years I’ve lived in my condo. Occasionally great ideas are exchanged on the site and I’ve seen a few of them get implemented on the property, which is great.

Number three and finally, I don’t understand the whole Facebook concept of friendship. It doesn’t seem like anything I could really get into.

“I have over four hundred friends,” a co-worker confided, and I think that’s great. But in reality, isn’t it more of a hassle than anything else? How, for example, would you have a party (or soiree of any kind), and not feel obligated to invite all of them? And if you could only invite thirty or so, would you then have to send out three-hundred and seventy explanatory notes as to why you left your other friends uninvited? And even with thirty, how much time would you be able to spend with any of them?

If Hamid Bubajari had requested to be my, say, ‘electronic acquaintance,’ that would make sense (although the answer would still be a delete). Better yet, he could have requested to be ‘added to the mile long distribution list attached to funny emails, chain letters, and other miscellaneous received at work throughout the day which must be forwarded immediately in order to avoid bad karma’. But to request to be a friend strikes me as just this side of bizarre.

It doesn’t mesh with my idea of what friendship is about. For example, if I want to know what’s going on with a friend, I’ll pick up the phone or better yet, go see them personally. I don’t ‘write on a wall’ on Facebook or even odder, ‘poke’ them through the website. I believe in the phrase, ‘if you would like to have a friend, be a friend’, but in my mind it doesn’t translate well to ‘if you would like to have a friend, add them to your contact list on Facebook.’

I guess Facebook is intended as a ‘social networking site’ and that’s another term I don’t quite understand, being somewhat confused as to how spending the majority of your time home alone, on your computer, on the site, can be considered any derivation of social. It’s much like LinkedIn, which claims to be a ‘professional networking site’. That one I did join, because it was requested that everyone in our organization join it, and yet I don’t feel I’ve done any networking there or enhanced either my professional performance or position. If anything, about the only action I’ve made on the site is to again hit the delete key on ‘invitations to join my network’, the most recent being a request this morning from Inge Jaltinner.

I had no idea who Inge Jaltinner was, then realized we’d worked on a program together seven years ago, and saw after reading her profile that she was no longer even in the same industry. I can’t see any reason to network (whatever that means in this context) with a cheese manufacturer so like I said, delete.

I shouldn’t go there, but Twitter is something else I can’t comprehend, although it rivets me in its own way. On the website for the local news channel (which I check periodically throughout the day, if for no other reason than to see if I should take the freeway home or detour around the accident du jour), one of the newscasters regularly ‘tweets’ about ‘what she’s doing right that minute’, and it’s always and without fail something fascinating such as, “the kids are eating cereal right now….”, “we just returned from the zoo and Bobby loved the tigers!” or even more suspenseful, “Timmy threw a Tonka truck down the stairs and I don’t know yet if we can fix it.” I don’t see the purpose but maybe there really is someone out there in the world who honestly needs to know about that Tonka truck, and they’re thrilled with the technology that allows them to know every detail of its existence and/or demise.

I wish Hamid and Inge the best of luck in their Facebooking, LinkingIn, and Twittering, but for myself, life is much simpler unlinked with the Facebook closed and no twitters floating around out there for anybody. If nothing else, it saves me immense amounts of time at the computer, which is good because I need that time to keep up with other ways new technology creeps into your life whether you prefer it to or not.

Frankly, I need that time to keep up with emails and texts coming through on the Blackberry.