Stret ching Out the Dis cus sion.

I don’t like social networking.

This may sounds silly coming out of the mouth of a blogger, though I’m hardly the diehard post-a-day variety. But it’s true, I don’t like social networking. I let my Facebook sit inactive for months (as Adreanna can tell you, it gets a little heated on there at times, what with all my friends wondering whether or not I’ve died).

I feel like there’s something very low energy and very low effort about Facebook, while at the same time being very invasive. And it creates an obligation of return. So what Facebook does to my friendships is reduce them down to two lines of text at a time, which I don’t have to put any thought or energy into, a very surface level of friendship, but it obligates me to update this veneer several times a week – if not several times a day. As though I am not really interested in the friendship unless I send a cheesy animated flower. I don’t like this.

It’s why I like blogs and emailing. They tend to be deeper and more intense, more introspective and encourage more actual discussion of real life and topics that matter. So sue me, I like to think about things and share insights with likeminded people. And I like to occasionally discuss topics I don’t want to share with everyone I’ve known since I was two, every person who’s ever attended a church with my parents, and every one of my distant relatives I may or may not have actually met. Facebook does not lend itself to this, either depth of communication nor the sharing of personal facts.

I also do not Twitter (Tweet? I don’t know, I’m not in the know, I don’t Tweeter).

Which comes straight to the point of the post…. I’m starting to feel bitter toward Twitter (ooh rhyming), because I feel like it’s fragmenting the discussions that used to go on around the blogosphere. So many bloggers use Twitter these days that the post ideas that circulate, often go round on Twitter, so a non Tweeterer doesn’t get the message until the topic is stale.

I feel like sometimes to follow a single discussion I have to follow it in multiple media? Eek! Call me a luddite, I hate to have my discussions squeezed into 100-something character snippets or fragmented across twelve different spheres of conversation. My life is abbrieviated and fragmented enough, thank you.

This isn’t really a complaint or accusation, just a personal whine I’ve been meaning to get off my chest. It’s frightening that at 26 years old, I’ve already become a crabby old woman who won’t keep up with the latest means of communication because it’s scary and new. But there it is.