abology

Just so you won’t be afraid, really. Here you can see Dr. Evil standing guard over the Internet which, as we all know by now, is a series of tubes.

Once in a while, one of my friends comes up with the dreaded question: why don’t you open a Facebook account? A reasonably simple question, followed by a rather complex explanation and stares of disbelief. Here, I’d like to address the issue once and for all if possible.

First and foremost, human relations are way more complicated than just a connection between two profiles on a social networking site and this is something we conveniently forget most of the time: family, neighbours, acquaintances, colleagues, friends and girlfriends are totally different groups, possibly overlapping and constantly changing, but each with a distinct set of information that you want to share and rules for doing so, informal as they may be. On Facebook, whatever you write in your status message and profile is visible by all your contacts regardless of their relation to you, with the obvious consequence that you have to write rather bland tidbits for the most distant group, i.e. neighbours and acquaintances, if you wish to play safe or risk exposing sensitive information if your target group is friends and colleagues. Not cool.

Sometimes my reply is that I already am an expert at wasting my time and don’t need another way of doing that. Though it is delivered with a smile, this answer has a deeper meaning: I already have LinkedIn for professional connections and CouchSurfing for traveling and meeting new people; keeping them up to date requires time and I have no wish for yet another social network site to maintain. I prefer to use that time for meeting actual people, as opposed to just reading their profiles, or for my hobbies.

Another underestimated issue is privacy, or lack of, in Facebook: without even getting into the conspiracy theories surrounding it, at least I’d like to try and keep my private data to myself, as much as possible. Usually, when I raise this point, the other party suggests that I create a profile with a pseudonym, which is naive for at least a couple of reasons: for starters if I were to use a service like this I’d want to use my real name to maximise its networking potential but, most importantly, we already know that anonymous data isn’t.

So, for the time being, no Facebook account for me. Thank you for your time.

Apparently, everybody and his dog now have a blog so it must be cool. I couldn’t care less about that type of coolness, but I do need a public place to store my ramblings and technical escapades.

Quite often I find useful guides and howtos on other blogs, so I decided that on the off-chance that I stumble upon something remotely useful for other people I would post it here. For that reason, most of the posts will be in english.

As always, have fun!