If you wanted to know the answer to this question, the simple solution is to pick up the phone and call your friend/spouse/sibling, right? Not any more. Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and, especially, Twitter are providing us with the answer without ever having to ask the question.
But do you really want people to know where you are? Or what you are doing? It sounds a little Big Brother-ish to me. Yet millions of people are publicly sharing this information without worry. Okay, I confess…I have put my “Corey is…” notification up on Facebook two or three times. I am still not totally comfortable with the idea, though. Has society’s definition of personal privacy changed or are we just being given the opportunity to define it as we see fit?
Granted, I was a little late to the social networking party. I joined Facebook less than a year ago and I was nervous about the whole thing. I’m proud to say I have loosened up a bit since then. I actually joined LinkedIn first. The idea of it being a professional network somehow made it less scary. However, the same hesitations I initially felt with Facebook I now have with Twitter.
My skeptical thoughts were somewhat eased with this explanation from Common Craft. And Sharon Sarmiento’s post on Painless Social Networking for Newbies totally spoke to me! She provides some great advice on how to use Twitter (both personal and profession), what to say, how not to expose private info to search engines and…my favorite…to ”start slow and easy.” This information has brought me one step closer to picking up my smart phone to update my whereabouts via SMS.
So, to those of you who use Twitter, what are your thoughts? Did you ever have feelings or thoughts similar to mine?
-Corey
I’ve expressed my disinterest in twitter in the past, but I do use Facebook and update my status quite frequently. Is that hypocritical? Although I rarely expose important information, I do sometimes tell people where I am or what I am doing. Does anyone care? Probably not. I mainly use the status feature to amuse myself or others, not to give people pertinent updated on my whereabouts or activities.
Actually, I have the same thought with you, Corey. I am always curious why Twitter, which some people called microblogging, becomes so popular around this world. For my personal experience, I barely update what I am doing on Facebook and Twitter because I just do not feel comfortable to “upload myself and my privacy” into a public place and honestly, I am too lazy to update my actions at every moment. However, I do love to see my friends’ any information about their lives without asking them. I can get the same, maybe much more information than I call them every day. Therefore, I do appreciate the invention of Facebook and Twitter because it helps me to show my care of people I know without bothering them.
Therefore, I think Twitter also reveals the characteristics of people who live in this modern society. They are busy and hard to keep in touch with their family and friends all the time, but they still need their friends to pay attention on their lives to share their emotion. Moreover, I think that humans are like paprazzi in some part. The function of Twitter and Facebook satisfy humans to watch the lives of other people even they do not know.
It is good that people have more tools and channels to follow the news from people they care. However, we already have too many tools such like email, rss, blog, and IM to do the same job and we also spend much time on them. Is it necessary to have one more to increase our burden?