The Facebook Fallacy

So I joined Facebook. What a joke.

Yeah a few people from high school found me. So did a lot of other people, many of whom I haven't seen in a long time. Some for good reasons.

I don't get "the wall." Is it a chat forum? Is it an inconvenient spin-off of the email concept? Who reads it? Why am I supposed to care that someone I haven't seen in 15 years is grocery shopping at this very moment?

How is this thing supposed to be helpful?

I'm fighting the urge to cancel it, but I'm going to try and last at least a week. I do want to give it a fair shake, if for no other reason than to have even more firepower when someone tries to argue how awesome it is.

And since I'm on a techno roll, I decided to check out Twitter and Kindle, two other techno fads that I commonly rail against. So far Twitter looks to be even more absurd than Facebook, and Kindle, while intriguing and possibly more environmentally friendly than books, is something I remain suspicious of.

Isn't technology supposed to make life simpler? My life isn't simpler when I have several computers, an iPhone, two social networking services, chat, email, fifty different passwords for all my various devices and online accounts, and I'm trying to do my work and keep up with the mundane details of dozens of people I may or may not know and may or may not care about. What's the point? I'd rather have one good friend to have a beer with once a week and have a real conversation with than a hundred "friends" on Facebook who want to send virtual pokes and newsflashes about what their cat left in the litter box.

[sigh]

I wanna be a cowboy.

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.