The Hangout and the Bazaar
I have been more active of late in both the Twittersphere and Facebook universes and have a few observations to share.
Facebook is cool and is a great place to connect with friends. New and old friends all in one spot. The feel is more like a social club or hangout than an internet site. This means that people say things (as many have pointed out) that they might not say in front of their boss, mom, or who knows who else. This has led to the two-face-book approach where people have their friends profile and their work profile separate. This way when you comment on the silly photo of your friend who has had too much to drink it doesn't show up on your bosses page and so on. After all, Facebook is now for old fogies. (I suppose that's me as over the course of a few weeks I had numerous friends ping and prod me to get online as things like school reunions become the talk of the day.) It has the feel of being a semi-private club where what you say is sort of private though you know that it is subject to repeat.
Twitter on the other hand is like a big bazaar on the internet. Everything is there and nothing is really private. There is an ability to keep your updates to only people you approve but it is not regularly done. There is a social etiquette followed regarding followers and following, numbers and post types, frequency etc. This gives a basic structure though there is the constant pressure of those attempting to use things for their own marketing (and annoying) messages. Just search on something current like #Startrek (Hashing is a way to mark tweets for easy search and trending)(The new Star Trek is a fabulous movie by the way, both Campy and High Tech and Throw Back and Modern all at once. GO SEE IT.)
So I am using both. For different reasons. I love connecting with old friends and reconnecting with people I have lost track of on Facebook. I also love the raw feed feel of twitter though. It feels like the early days of Bulletin Boards when you could chat all day with people you didn't know connected only by your interest in computers and ability to type.
3 comments:
Glad I found your blog - very interesting stuff around topics which I often ponder, but generally lack the time and/or the social infrastructure required to enable decent conversations about.
(and when I say social infrastructure I'm referring to real people made out of meat and stuff. Not facebook groups and faceless cyber entities)
"The early days of Bulletin Boards," you say? Hmm... sounds familiar.
Through one of those random, meandering Internet experiences, I landed on your Google+ page this evening. I did a double-take, but was willing to bet that there aren't that many others with the same name from Bainbridge, graduating from SUNY-B in 1994, etc. It's not a small world, not in the least, but sometimes...
I didn't want to just go ahead and throw you in a circle - having not entirely learned my way around Google+ yet, plus feeling a little like Dante, just indiscriminately adding people to circles - but couldn't quickly/easily find a better way to toss you a message than this.
So I thought I'd say hey, since it's been, what? 20 years? Very close to that, anyway. Quite a bit has happened between then and now, obviously, but I hope life has treated you kindly.
Take care,
Kate
Yep. It's me. Sent you a note on flickr. We'll see if we can connect.
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