patndoris TechnoGeek

I read an interesting quote recently about why people either embrace or abstain from Facebook. In my typical, and often convoluted way - it reminded me of lemmings, of mass movements and social hysteria - breeding not uniqueness, but instead, reducing us to clone-like conformity with one another.

Take a  look at the basic premise - most of us crave an audience. In fact, by adding contacts and making our profiles public we actively seek them out - we create one if it doesn’t exist. We eagerly upload statuses and photos from our mobile phones. We hurry to tell the world what we are doing, what we like, what we don’t. We take quizzes to see just how much we are alike or different from everyone else. We rate. We write. We rant. We don’t do it so much to "keep in touch" as to enthrall the ever present audience we believe is hanging on to our every move. Certainly, the information we are providing about us is far more interesting than that anyone else is posting to the same pool of people. We are unique right? We are different. We are intriguing. We are special! We perform - and we love every moment of it.

But some people avoid such sites like the plague. The general perception is they don’t want to share personal information.  Perhaps in some cases it is true. But is it more than that? Maybe it is not the fear or concern of exposure of the personal, but the fear that doing so will illuminate the reality - they are just like everyone else. The performance, no matter how brilliant it is, will not likely render them unique. By abstaining from such sites, they can maintain the illusion. They won’t melt into the sea of sameness with the rest of the masses. Is this being anti-social? Or is it self preservation?

As time has progressed, we have gone from using our vocal chords to communicate, to the backlit keys on our mobile phones. Rather than taking center stage with our loud and ringing voice as we tell our tales, we now exist in the Feed and on the Wall. We live in a two dimensional pixilated era where we can instantly gratify those who we are surely our devoted followers. But do we deceive ourselves? Only the few truly set themselves apart. Has the mass movement towards social networking on the internet begun the downfall and destruction of individuality? Are we all like lemmings, about to jump en masse off the cliff and into the sea? Oh well, my thought process on this (such as it was) is rapidly deteriorating - I think it’s time to check my Facebook feed and update my status. I like social networking - and I for one am not about to abstain from anything anytime soon.