I’ve noticed a trend.
Long ago a friend joined Yahoo 360. She told me to join, so I did. I told her brother to join, so he did. Well, sorta. I hacked his page because he never put up anything fun and then eventually he started posting some things there. She also got her mother on board.
Then she gently encouraged us with her whimsical quips and witty repartee into blogging. Made us feel terrible that *she* was writing things and thus, so should we. So, lemmings that we are, we complied.
Yahoo 360 was abandoned by it’s creators and we all had begun to despair over it’s buggy framework, so “The Mom”, who had become quite the blogger, found a new home for her writing. I followed and then the original network organizer.. let’s call her JG… followed suit. Her blogging had become less and less, but we all LOVED to read her stuff. Her brother, Doc, followed over to Multiply as well and there we were all happy for awhile.
Each of us gathered some new friends. The Mom kept writing, I wrote, JG wrote less and Doc wrote even less.
I’d had this page for awhile, since my daughter used to use one here as well. I’d never used it much, just kinda kept tabs on her while she was active here. Then she discovered Facebook and decided to switch her loyalties to them. Again, I hopped over there and registered as well because where she has a page, so do I.
Now, it seems, the latest “hop” in the lemming world is over to Facebook. JG, who has had a page there but it was pretty inactive, is picking up steam. The Mom is there now as well and the Doc, I see, has also made the leap.This lemming effect went through my immediate family as well.. my sons, hubby and daughter all had MySpace pages and then Facebook pages. Really? How many pages do we need? And as if that weren’t enough, we are all twittering away as well.
Stop the insanity!!
The problem is that once you stop morphing and mutating to all the different platforms that are the “network du jour”, you lose touch with the people you care about. No one writes a letter anymore, and heck, a phone call or a personal visit is even a difficult thing to arrange, so unless you just don’t care about what is going on and you don’t mind losing contact, you kinda have to be a social network lemming. And as you gain more friends on these networks who aren’t in lemming mode, you also then find yourself visiting 3 or 4 social networks just to keep up with everyone, the whole time refreshing your page to see if you got a tweet. O. M. G.
At one point JG had made it her personal vendetta against the IT world at her work to figure out a way to still see her tweets because she was missing so many during work hours it was driving her crazy! And Doc logged on after months, only to realize that no one is writing blogs anymore. I could have told him that if he were still talking to me.. lol.
A few thoughts.
First.. what happened to chat? What happened to AIM or Messenger or any of the other chat networks? Do they not work anymore? I mean, you could just make a chatroom and invite all the people you want to pop by and make comments at random intervals and never have to worry about being shut down for an hour because you refreshed your page over 70 times in 60 minutes to “keep up” with a conversation you were having in a platform that was never meant for extended conversations, but was just supposed to be a status update. A quick witty blurb about what you were doing. Heck, they even limit the amount of characters you get!! Talk about stunted communications!!
Do I still go pop over there now and then to see what’s up? Sure! But I also still write blogs, too.
And what’s with Skype?
The whole thing is enough to make your head spin.
I guess with social networking, like with friends, you grow out of certain sites, or the grass looks greener on a new interface. Dunno… they all have things I like and don’t like about them, but some of the sites feel more like friends than others do, so I guess there are some places this lemming just won’t follow to.
You know, while I was writing this, I got notification that someone friended me, I got a comment on my status, my blog was viewed and I got an email. Lol! Guess it’s time to make the rounds.
Snippets and Tidbits 