A little while back at Text Patterns, Alan Jacobs responded to the claim that opting out of technology like Facebook is no longer possible. His reply was very commonsensical:
“I love this almost-always-on connected life, Lord knows I do, but of course opting out is an option even for those who want to be “informed,” at least for now. I could subscribe to and read only print magazines — even just monthly and quarterly magazines — and be fully informed about everything I need to be informed about.
We tell ourselves, by way of self-justification, that we need Twitter, need our RSS feeds, need Facebook. But no, we don’t. We just like them very much. And as far as I’m concerned that’s good enough. It’s just necessary always to remember that we’re making choices and could, if we wished, make different ones about how we’re informed and what we’re informed about.”
And, here is an older quote from James Bowman that I just stumbled upon. Honor is a topic dear to Mr. Bowman’s heart, but this is the first time I noticed him relating social networking to it:
“That may be one reason why so many young people are eager to escape that world for the different sort of friendship offered by Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. Those friends don’t have their eyes on you all the time, and their access to you may be controlled. Also…they make only trivial and mostly painless demands upon you. Friendship, in being extended so widely is cheapened, and its hold upon us — which is the power of honor and shame — is accordingly loosened. Like those comforting abstract concepts of our ethical world, mankind, humanity, or Planet Earth, our virtual friendships eventually reach a point where they are too large in number and too remote to care very much what any individual does.”
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January 19, 2011 at 11:50 am
David
I think we should combine a technologically advanced conglomeration of texting, twitter, facebook and create a super knowledgable entity that promotes the progress of humanity and reminds us of who we are!!! — A textbook.
September 17, 2011 at 12:35 am
KidKoala
This article could not possibly have said it any better. I have never been apart of any social networking site and never will for that matter. I have recently come upon a realization as to the magnitude at which people lie on facebook. My sister, who I do not get along with the least bit, has a son that I have raised the last four years while she leads the life of a character seen on the bad girls club. Her facebook is the biggest jumble of lies saying how she’s in nursing school and a struggling single mother, both of which are far from the truth. All of my friends know how she is, at times wasted or sober from guilt, she would show up to try to take her son from me. Come to find out….all of my friends are friends with her on facebook and even go so far as to encourage her scholastic ventures and praise her for being a hardworking single mom. I don’t know what to do, I feel so betrayed. Facebook is a cancer on society…it’s like highschool to the millionth degree…funny because I guess on facebook my sister has all my friends and in real life I have no true friends. Facebook killed loyalty..