OK, so I was wrong, but I’m not too proud to admit it. Not nearly as bad as the Microsoft Chief Technology Officer who asserted in 1994 that the internet would only ever be the domain of “hobbyists”.
Here are the tandard eight or so reasons:
1. Since my original Salt in Wound posting on this topic, 2/3 of my household has joined, and they seem the richer for it.
2. My son gets to spend time chatting with his school friends without the need to be transported around. Lest you think this leads to less personal contact, I think it has actually enhanced it – he has already used Facebook to organize a movie outing and a ski trip.
3. It is saving me money. My son has stopped asking for $50 Wii games. In fact, he’s pretty much stopped playing them.
4. My various privacy and nuisance concerns, valid at the time of posting, seem to have been addressed by recent upgrades.
5. Facebook has killed Salt in Wound. Let’s face it, Jack Silbert is pretty much single-handedly keeping this afloat, but more people would read his posts if he just put them on his own Facebook page. Blogging may turn out to be the CB radio of the ’00s.
6. Micaela showed me where 3/4 of the Vehicle Flips first album lineup were chatting about the lime green ice skating figuring lamps that Jeff bought in Northampton back in 1994. Hey guys, what about me?
7. Somewhere I had the idea that Facebook had the qualities of MySpace, which remains one of the ugliest interfaces I have ever encountered. About this, I was way off.
8. The Gazetteers have a Facebook page that I didn’t even know about, with 150 friends (Rob probably told me, but I forgot). There are several serious ironies here: one, at most only about 10 of these so-called friends ever actually went ahead and freely downloaded our latest album. Second, several people used this forum to implore me to get a Facebook page. That wasn’t a good way to reach me. What this tells me is that people aren’t even bothering to visit old-school web sites anymore.
Jack Silbert, curator