I joined facebook. I didn’t want to, it just kinda happened. For some reason I have an irrational fear of facebook, or rather for no reason I have an irrational fear of facebook! It’s always had the same place in the back of my dark mind as myspace, and I have bowed, in a way, to them. But over the past week facebook seems to have swept through work like a virus. Everyone just joined up in the space of a few days. Email invites went flying around and people started talking about those they had as friends. I even got an invite from a distant cousin I’ve never even met. So I did a little digging and asked a few questions and it seemed as if my fears were unfounded, so I signed up (that bit was just too easy) and added in the people on my mail list from hotmail. I also got invited by a few work colleagues so I’m a member of the work group too.
But facebook does have a strange underbelly! I am 35 years old, I work in new media so by default it’s kind of my job to join these things to see how they work. In my investigation to who else might be on facebook I discovered that my mother-in-law is on there. Thankfully she only has one friend, but it gets worse. Her one friend has more friends than me, actually she has more friends than most of my friends. Quite frankly it makes me feel inadequate!
I suppose the up side of this is that social networking is no longer the domain on the young and the hip (new media bods), or the school kids, or the internet weirdos. The fact that mums and dads, uncles and aunts, cousins and possibly grandparents are using social networking to keep in touch with their rapidly dispersing families is quite cool.
