Does social networking irk you?

[TheSegaSaturnGuy]

The thing that irks me about social networking is that my girlfriend is obsessed. When we are out to eat and waiting on our food she is constantly refreshing Facebook while I am trying to carry on a conversation. I do have Facebook but I might check it once a week, I use twitter mainly because I follow several video game news accounts which update with stories more frequently than gaming news sites.

[J T]

Facebook needs a "meh" button too.

[GazongaJoe]

Xanga.... Nuff said.

[Key-Glyph]

*the entire post a few pages back*

Yes to all of that.

I have also made the "snacking" analogy before, because a lot of social networking is like empty calories. You can trick your brain into thinking you're enjoying a close friendship by keeping up with someone's day-to-day activities, but we all know that getting the facts about what someone ate for lunch or did for their birthday is not actual closeness. Without real, deliberate communication of those facts, you're just reading the equivalent of People Magazine.

Knowing what people have been up to in their daily lives feels like real closeness because one usually only came into that knowledge by means of a deeper connection already established. Either you were important enough to someone to be sought out and told something, or someone else was important enough to you to be sought out and told something. I don't just mean face-to-face, either. Penpals and online relationships are just as fulfilling when someone communicates the message, "Hey, I thought of you today; I'd like to purposely share a bit of my life with you." Facebook can be used to this end, but a great deal of what's happening is that the emotional correlation is remaining intact even in situations where the actual closeness is not.

I used to love LiveJournal, which admittedly has a Facebook-esque "bulletin board" style to it, meaning that you don't so much share your inner life like a personal gift to specific people, but you tack up general proclamations on a wall for bystanders to peruse. But LiveJournal invited lengthy discussions in the comments, not unlike a good forum might (wink wink), and so "real" communication was always the inherent goal of each post. At least it was for me. I realize that Facebook discussions happen, but I'm given to believe they're not the norm. Mostly it seems to be random spurts of one-way communication and some thumbing-up, which is not a style I particularly enjoy anymore.

I do think Facebook can be great for loved ones that are spread out and are already legitimately close, though. The trick is that in those cases social networking is supplementing their relationships, and not the other way around. But once you start accepting every friend request and the important stuff gets diminished within all that white noise, you're backsliding again.

[Curlypaul]

The thing that irks me about social networking is that my girlfriend is obsessed. When we are out to eat and waiting on our food she is constantly refreshing Facebook while I am trying to carry on a conversation. I do have Facebook but I might check it once a week, I use twitter mainly because I follow several video game news accounts which update with stories more frequently than gaming news sites.

This.

Whenever I go out with my friends most of them spend the night updating and checking FB. I mean I think the point of the site is to be able to talk to people when you are otherwise alone, but when you are in the middle of a real social situation, what the hell is the point in wasting it by staring at your phone the whole damn time?

Another winge - the quality of the posts that I see on there has dropped like a brick out of the sky. A couple of years back I could see comments and status' that I could answer and have some sort of conversation about. Now it just seems like endless links to you tube videos, images that contain some philosophy on life, cute kittens, etc etc. I gaze at FB every now and then but never find anything that I feel like getting involved in anymore.