Matt Labash isn't a fan of Facebook and his crankiness leads to some entertaining writing. My problem with Facebook is sort of different. I initially signed up with the social networking behemoth when it was confined to college kids brandishing party cups. My profile was shared with friends and friends alone. There's nothing embarrassing on there, insofar as embarrassing implies prostitutes photographed in front of fetishistically collected glassware, but there's a lot that makes me look less like an expert on congressional procedure and more like someone who goes out with friends on the weekends and occasionally makes weird faces as the shutter clicks. Facebook's swift move from my personal life to my public life wasn't an expected transition, and I've never quite understood how to deal with it. So the unanswered friend requests near 1,000 and I log on with guilt. A similar thing happened with twitter, where a service that I thought was for social group communication unexpectedly emerged as a new type of political communication, albeit not one with any value I can detect. I dealt with that by starting a public twitter, though for reasons I don't understand, I still get daily requests to join the non-public twitter, and so still feel like a jerk for not responding. But that's my problem with all this: It's all new enough to not know what its supposed to be, and so the rules and procedures that worked for Facebook in 2005, or Twitter in 2007, are inapplicable now. THE SOCIAL ANXIETY OF SOCIAL MEDIA.
Matt Labash isn't a fan of Facebook and his crankiness leads to some entertaining writing. My problem with Facebook is sort of different. I initially signed up with the social networking behemoth when it was confined to college kids brandishing party cups. My profile was shared with friends and friends alone. There's nothing embarrassing on there, insofar as embarrassing implies prostitutes photographed in front of fetishistically collected glassware, but there's a lot that makes me look less like an expert on congressional procedure and more like someone who goes out with friends on the weekends and occasionally makes weird faces as the shutter clicks. Facebook's swift move from my personal life to my public life wasn't an expected transition, and I've never quite understood how to deal with it. So the unanswered friend requests near 1,000 and I log on with guilt. A similar thing happened with twitter, where a service that I thought was for social group communication unexpectedly emerged as a new type of political communication, albeit not one with any value I can detect. I dealt with that by starting a public twitter, though for reasons I don't understand, I still get daily requests to join the non-public twitter, and so still feel like a jerk for not responding. But that's my problem with all this: It's all new enough to not know what its supposed to be, and so the rules and procedures that worked for Facebook in 2005, or Twitter in 2007, are inapplicable now. 
