OK, for the last (and first) time, I don’t use social networks. If you do that’s cool and I hope you enjoy it bigtime and it’s fulfilling fun and useful. But I don’t use them for a lot of reasons so please don’t send me an invite as it will be a waste of bandwidth. Really, don’t.
But some will ask why. Fair enough; as Jennifer Aniston says, “Here’s the science!”:
Reason 1: To paraphrase the Zero Wing commander Cats: “All your information are now belong to us”
Those who have avoided the Oscars, X-factor/American Idol/Big Brother or whatever other pop culture distraction currently out there might have noticed a thrice reported story about Facebook and their view of copyright - i.e. when you post, it’s theirs not yours. I say “thrice reported” as this is the third time Facebook has tried to go to this stance with your data on Facebook.
Now there is a universal policy of “you post it, we can use it” on web forums and other web-communities of that sort (deletions of masses of content would seriously impair their existence) and are treated much the same way as that of letters written to the editor of a newspaper - the editor isn’t going to re-call all newspapers printed when you change your mind about what you wrote. But Facebook is about you, your friends, your network, your opinions and is really more of a personal website that is a sub-site of a much bigger portal. Other than the network connections that makes Facebook’s unique(ish) proposition, there’s nothing special about it and it’s not incumbent on society to protect Facebook’s value proposition. It’s Facebook’s burden to persuade us that we get value from their network and telling us that although we’ve taken the effort to leave (for whatever reason, but in no way will they be all, or even partially, positive reasons) we can’t delete our data is not an argument, it’s a diktat. And the thing about dictators is that blood always ends up on the carpet; sometimes ours but always (in the end) theirs.
Oh, and I can actually produce a website or two (and ten-thousand times more attractive than Facebook). And so can you. It’s cheap and not rocket science. I don’t need a faceless, multi-billion dollar corporation to do it for me.
Reason 2: You can’t escape the Spanish Inquisition
As Ayn Rand said, “the savage lives his life in the public domain subject to the rules of the tribe” - this synposizes social networking in a sentence. You may see Facebook and Linkedin, WAYN, Bebo and the others as your little world with your little group of friends; thing is you can’t control who peeks in and who pours gasoline on some fire a friend of yours starts.
There are widely published stories of people who have lost jobs, or been rejected at the finish line, because of what they, or someone in their network, said or posted on a social networking site. Sorry, but I won’t scrub my friendlist and dump anyone with anything but the most bland, inoffensive views. For one thing I would be friendless in cyberspace and for another I object strongly to the implication that something I did in a previous, unrelated section of my life should affect my chances to day and I don’t want to be judged by the views or actions of a friend of a friend. Which leads nicely into the primary reason why I don’t and won’t use social networks….
As Charlie Rich used to sing: “I love my friend(s)”
I have lots of friends, all over the place, literally and figuratively. I have friends who are fundamentalist evangelical christians and friends who are gay. I have friends who are Shia, friends who are Sunni and friends who are Republicans (including Irish, English and American Republicans). I have friends who drink and those who are aggressively tee-total; friends who love rock’n’roll and friends who think it’s the devil’s own language; friends who drive cars with over 1000 horsepower and friends who are eco-fundamentalists that make their own low-carbon, organic clothing. You get the picture - Hatfields on this side; McCoys over there on that side. I love ‘em all and if anyone objects, then tough shit, I don’t shop my friends.
But on the practical day-to-day side of things, I’m a trustee of a charity that works with adult victims of child abuse, mostly sexual abuse; some of them are still sought out by their abusers. They know that I’m their voice putting my head above the parapet publicly so they don’t have to and they can go thru their lives living it as normally as possible without inadvertently giving away their connection to me (and hence a clue to their whereabouts) themselves or thru another of my friends on a social network. Some of my very silly leftie friends are besotted with the crack addiction of their Palestinian advocacy fetish. It’s inevitable that some of the more naive of them put me a degree or two away from some jihadist dickhead; probably within the ironically named Stop the War coalition in the UK. I don’t want to have to hold up a microscopically thin sliver of credibility and say “nothing to do with me officer, they’re just linked to me…”
So you see, it’s a bit of a quandary of contradiction that I choose to live in the middle of. I’m OK with that; it’s risky at times but it’s where I can get things that need doing done. What I’m not OK with is being judged by the social-network tribe like some Bronze Age non-individual whose worth is summed up by his value to the tribe and his obeisance to the terror gods that Yahweh whacked into insignificance with a casual backhand going on 4000 years ago. No thanks, I’ll keep control of my identity and individuality myself, thanks. So please, don’t invite me; I’ll think you don’t read my blog or something.
