Saturday, 4 September 2010

Facebook mystery, what’s it for?

During lunchtime today my son, who is of course of a different generation, suggested I join Facebook.

It was a bit of a, “if you like Blogger you will like Facebook” type of recommendation, anyway I have had a go at this.

It’s all a bit strange and seems to based around something called a “friend” initially much of it seems to be about asking people if they want to be your friend and they asking you if you want to be their friend.

I sense that the term “friend” has a different meaning to what it has in ordinary life and that in some cases it may even mean what enemy means in the real world.

Asking what Facebook actually does has met with more reactions than explanations so far.

Asking people, some of whom you don’t know and some of whom you do, to “be friends” with you, is somehow reminiscent of the first day at a new school.

And then there is the business of those people, some of whom you don’t know and some of whom you do, asking “be friends with me” well at the moment I shall just say yes and see what happens.

Messages are appearing on my Facebook page, along the lines of “Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are now friends” and I am wondering if this information should interest me in some way.

There is also the peculiar dimension of security settings, this seems to be about putting information on the internet that you don’t want people to see and then adjusting the settings so that people can’t see it.

Blogger I can just about manage, Twitter I just couldn’t get on with, I have formed an impression, which may be wrong, that it has something to do with mobile phones, something that I tend to dissolve.

I think my Facebook url is http://www.facebook.com/michaelsbookshop and I am going to try and master how to use it.
During my childhood I often got the feeling that there was some secret that everyone else knew about, but I didn’t, I suppose at the time I must have wanted to know what that secret was. Well Facebook is evidently such a secret and I suppose I am now old enough to know that I may not wish to discover what it is.

3 comments:

  1. Michael, I am told that P&O's European Seaway will be arriving in Ramsgate at 09.00, to collect personel for the opening of the windfarm. I hope this reaches you intime as this is a bit of a rarity!

    ReplyDelete
  2. 3.07 completely missed it, sorry. I also can’t see anything about it elsewhere.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just berthing trials for a later press/shareholder event for the Wind Farm

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.