The Elfin Blog

Yesterday I finally broke down and signed up on Facebook. I have been wary of joining any of the social networking sites for a while, mostly because of privacy concerns. Skippy recently expressed some similar views about online social communities, and I definitely understand where he’s coming from.

The turning points for me were when, first, I walked into my wife’s office and saw that she too had signed up on Facebook. Of course she had a gozillian friends already, but a lot of them were people I certainly didn’t know very well. I was interested, sure, but not really sold on the benefits of joining such a site. Next, my friend Dave signed up. Dave can be tremendously misanthropic, so to see that he had signed up was something of a shock. When I asked him about it, she said that he’d been able to get in contact with people he hadn’t spoken with in years, and really enjoyed talking with some of them.

Well, last night, after a bottle of wine, I broke down and signed up. I have to admit I do sort of get a kick out of finding people I have not spoken to in a while. And Facebook is a convenient way to stay current on the lives of friends who are busy and with whom I don’t speak as much as I’d like. Having said all that, nothing can replace the satisfaction of sitting down with a friend or acquaintance and catching up face to face over a few beers. No matter how much technology makes it easier to stay in quasi-constant contact with our peers, it will never be superior to the real thing.