Another off-topic purge - diarrhea of the keyboard really... from the member of the Sax team voted most likely to wear a "transformers" t-shirt to a family event. To start off with:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/21and on a more serious note:
http://news.google.com/?ned=us&ncl=1123901381&hl=en&topic=t
I actually dropped my Facebook account a little over a month ago when they started to move in the direction of opening up their networks a lot more (it's going to get a lot worse in the next few years). I really don't miss it. The most annoying thing about it was that none of the emails it generated weren't individually annoying enough to spur me to action to figure out how to cut down on the emails they were sending. There are only so many hours in they day.
Why did someone like me even have an account? I think there was a girl involved. Somehow there always is with things like this. Without any data other than experience, I would say that most frequenters of social networking sites (ie Xanga, Facebook and Myspace) are girls, and the rest are guys more hip than I. Anyway some girl I was interested in back in 2003 told me to sign up, so I did. It was fairly harmless - for quite some time actually. Eventually though, an ancillary to Metcalf's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law) began to take hold, and I found myself suddenly a part of a huge data pool of interrelated information that began to feel somehow scary to a computer science bone buried deep in my body. Here we have Erik's law: the creepiness of a social network increases as n^3 as the number - n - of humans involved increases.
There is something about social networking sites that turns otherwise normal people into voyeurs. I think the tipping point for me was when I started to get invited to night clubs by a friend from high school. I remember reading an article about teenagers - who had somehow come to see social networking sites as the primary form of communication - email was a way to communicate with adults. What a concept! Who were these teenagers? Where were their parents? Why is Chris Hanson able to catch so many predators?
While it's true that leveraging a communication medium to communicate with as many people as possible has value - (you're reading this!) - it's more ill-advised than a teenager could hope to understand to put most of the stuff they end up putting out there. It's hard to censor other people after all, when that's how they communicate with you. "Hey, you comin over later?" - "Nah, my parents are dragging me to grandma's, we'll be back tomorrow." - "Sucks. Still want the math assignment?" - "Yeah, can you drop it in my mailbox?" " You still at 12345 moron dr..."
It's getting to be more effort than it's worth to censor myself and Claire on this site, but it's not as inherently bad because of the semantics of "comments" versus actually sending messages. Who knows? Maybe this format will stick.
Recently, another old friend sent me an even stranger canned email urging me to join Facebook. It almost seemed like an artificial message, an advertisement. "I'm going to share my profile and my pictures with friends so I can more easily keep up with everyone!"
Godspeed.
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