Saturday, April 16, 2011

soical network

I understand I hit a little bit of a nerve with my "menopausal" comments in my previous blog entry.
Please allow me to apologize. Please have the satisfaction of knowing that in 30ish years I will be in the same hormonal flux as all of you and will curse myself for being such an insolent and foolish young woman.
I am truly sorry.

With that said, I've been doing a lot of thinking about online social networking sites and how much they can really impact such a small town like the one I live in. Like, really. There are only 1 200ish people populating this community. Probably a good 15-20 percent are seniors and therefore internet alliterate (personal assumption) then there are your 65-40's who amazingly enough maybe 50 percent of them using social networking sites, then there's the everyone between the age of 40-13 who are almost 100% actively using socail networking sites.
If my math is correct, and believe me I crunched the numbers.
Really everyone you know is on your profile, the likely hood of you meeting someone outside of your community is slim (if you are over 30 and have a family, another assumption please don't take any of this personally) Then why even have a profile?
It's like the whole town is magnified and observed on a far too regular and public basis. The whole concept of this kind of site has been warped. Instead of opening up a wider world of friends it did just the opposite. The community is surrounding itself around status updates and profile comments and chats of other (and for the most part i stress only) members of the community not the wider world.
What got me thinking about this was the removal of the 5 or so employee's being removed from their managers profile friend list. This happened without any sort of explanation or even mention. Granted, her profile is hers to with with what she pleases but the people aren't only "online friends" but actual members of a not so much larger community. A community in which you have to watch what you say and to who you say it too, because everybody knows everybody....so...be careful.
It's wildly preposterous. All of it. I really think social networking sites didn't factor in small communities of people to their scheme,  I saw "Social Network" I know what they were going for.  It's a global community populated by 800ish people who all speak to one another on a daily and face to face basis.

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