Wednesday, December 1, 2010

A Theory on Social Networking

People are trying to collect complete sets ("Marge! I found the last woman I used to work with at Dunder Mifflin Inc.!"). How else to explain the sheer volume of friend requests from random people I went to high school with, who were not friends and who, indeed, in some cases never even spoke to me? Does the fact that we rode a school bus together in the seventh grade really warrant continued updates into your child's hockey team/husband's beer making/baby's potty training progress or my snack-food preferences/celebrity hate watch/cat's barf status? I think not.

I'd ditch the whole thing, but for the ten people I genuinely know and like, who post pithy things, using the word "yule" as an adjective. Some people really excel in the medium.

2 comments:

Toby said...

Yes, Mark has a way with status updates. An alternate theory: people feel pressure to ratchet up their "friend count", possibly because they feel lame that they don't have as many friends as X person. So they start friending distant acquaintances to fill some imaginary quota they've set. Which is, of course, lame.

Personally, I think my talents lie in blog commenting.

Laura said...

Truly. You are a master. I think it's the demands of the long form.