I have seen this term posted around quite a lot lately. I assume Generation X has been superseded by Generation F. I guess as I get older it is harder to keep track. I know what it means but I don’t assume that it is important. I am the leading edge of the real baby boomers having been born less than a year after WWII ended. Each generation seems to have established a new title after that.
I was a Facebook (FB) participant for about six months, maybe more. I am not involved now. I found it to be too commercial and confining. I also think it is too tightly controlled and perhaps not controlled enough. I saw too much private information being made public knowledge.
In my opinion there is way too much information being complied about me just performing normal daily activities that I didn’t want to willing add to the store of publicly available information. That may be too late as I have already contributed some to FB.
I was trying to be very careful as I in no way “trust” FB and its use of personal information, no matter what “they” say about privacy. Immediately I starting seeing advertisements aimed at my demographic information in the sidebars. This is a first clue of why the “service” is free.
I quickly deleted all personal information about my education, schools, original home town, profession, and changed my age to indicate that I was over 100 years old. Soon the targeted marketing for my age group disappeared. No longer was I being encouraged to change careers and become a law enforcement officer. I assumed they figured a 110 year old man shouldn’t be trained to use a TASER.
What I really discovered is how much of my time it was taking. I spend to much time already with this and other blogs and what I consider a higher purpose for web media. Why should I worry about how my crops are growing in a pretend farm or who I killed in Mafia wars? FB readers have little interest in long posts like this one. FB is not a blog.
I saw lonely people spending ALL their time in FB. That indicates a kind of crisis in my way of social thinking. I am happy that these folks found a communication tool but I hope it can somehow encourage them to build face to face contacts as well. I’ll have to work on that once I retire and find it easier to hide behind the keyboard. Business contact is becoming much the same non-personal virtual communication. We are experimenting with Skype, which helps, but that is a post for another time.
The reunion with old friends was great. Some of THEM were trying to market to me. But pretty soon it got to be too much. I miss the immediate family activities and pictures but Gloria keeps up with that and I can take a look at the latest posted family pictures.
I may take a look again some day but it won’t be a public event. Perhaps I can be a lurker just checking on my family’s spirited FB use watching them blabbing all, demonstrating their solid membership in the Facebook Generation. Old dogs like me can learn new tricks or just hide in the FB shadows. I feel exposed enough with blogging.