Tuesday, October 20, 2009

I'm not alone, but I might not want to admit it

I adopted the whole blog writing thing late, after Wifey had been at it for at least a year. As I've said, I did it to create a space for me to look back at later in a way that I could never have done with a written journal. I'd tried a hand written journal before and could never stick with it. I'd even tried keeping a journal on the computer but I couldn't stay with that either. I know, big surprise - me not remembering to keep up with something. There is something about the public nature of this space, the fact that "it" is "out there" that makes me want to stay up to date with my posting. There isn't a single person who looks to this space with any expectation (including Wifey - I mean, she lives this with me!) but just being public makes me want to do my best.

Other than this blog though I just haven't gotten into the whole social networking arena. I've been gently (or sometimes not so gently) mocked for my resistance to joining Wifey and friends on Facebook, I haven't had any interest in tweeting, and you can take your My Space and shove it. But amongst my own age group I seemed to be a lone island of sanity in a sea of ridiculously addicted socialites. That is, until Wifey pointed out this article:

In a Generation That Friends and Tweets, They Don't

Yuppers, apparently we're such a well defined group that the Washington Post decided to write an article about us. It was an interesting read too, especially since I've been wavering in my devotion to remain unplugged. You see, although I've been thinking how nice it might be to have another means to keep up to date with people I have a very addictive personality and I know it and I don't want to feed it. That's why I'm very careful about my drinking, I don't gamble, and the only thing I allow myself to fall deep into is whatever game I'm playing on the computer. :) So I know that if I jump into Facebook it's inevitable that I'll be one of those goofs who get all wrapped up in whatever those games are on there, the ones that Wifey says she's always blocking. I'll be updating things all the time, adding info, searching for people that I've been perfectly happy not seeing or thinking about for years.

The bottom line - I think I'm just happy with the way things are going right now so it's pretty nice to hear that I'm not alone in resisting joining the hordes of automatons flocking to those sites.

My only problem? This from page 2 of the story...

On a broad level, there might be differences between those who tweet or issue status updates and those who don't. Pew researchers point to a new but very small study they conducted to show that resisters and adopters 18 to 29 have demographic differences: Social networkers are more likely to have an annual income of $75,000 or more, and nonusers are more likely to have only a high school education.
I'm wondering how quickly I can sign up for a FB account. And, how I can convince the MVA that I'm really 29 again.

1 comment:

Trillian42 said...

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who blocks all the games. Silly people and their mafia stuff. :)

And you are not the only one I know who is still resisting Facebook. But it's interesting to know that you have been fibbing about having a college degree. ;)

Congrats on figuring out how to widen the post column, by the way! I gave up and changed templates when I was on Blogger.