Facebook In Real Life?
Facebook as a social networking tool can be like many things, either really useful or really bad, it just depends how you want to use it and whether you use it to do something worthwhile or not. So when you see a funny video that tries to show just how you would be using it if you did the same kind of things in real life – it does make you stop and think for a moment about what you do online, similar to the Twitter in Real Life video we showed not too long ago.
Obviously this has all just been done for comedic value, but it does raise the fundamental question of whether you act different on the Internet to how you would in real life with people, does being behind a computer give you a certain amount more confidence, less manners or just more lack of respect?
Personally, I’ve recently changed how I use Facebook – to begin with I was friends with anyone and everyone (but set appropriate privacy levels obviously) that added me, for example, I ended up lots of other random bloggers round the world who I’d never actually communicated with and still didn’t once we were “Facebook Friends”. The outcomes of this were not only that your news feed get more background noise that doesn’t interest you (yes you can now filter it with the recent Facebook redesigns, but that doesn’t entirely solve the problem), but it also becomes generally less useful and something that for me at least in my head, it became just another job to check regularly and not a quick bit of fun to see what you real friends were up to.
It ultimately got to a point where I had to say no more, I had to have a purge and removed about half of the people who were “Facebook Friends”, I’m now much more selective about who I “befriend” on Facebook, but that now means that it’s become more useful to me again – like so many things in life, it is what you make of it and how you use it.
However, what I’ve also done is set up a separate fan page for Zath on Facebook, so if you’d like to stay up to date with the latest Zath happenings there, then please feel free to become a Fan of Zath on Facebook.
Do you use Facebook? If not, is there any particular reason why not? Do you do things differently on the Internet to how you would in real life?
Related Pages:
- Twitter In Real Life?
- The Facebook Redesign…Redesigned
- Facebook Vanity or Insanity URLs?
- Your Guide to The New Facebook Redesign
- Facebook Lite Launched – A Faster and Cleaner Interface!
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Comments: 16
12:22 pm 3rd August, 2009
I remember seeing this on TV. Strange how it’s dated now since Facebook has started to move further into Twitter imitation – is the “where we met” functionality still available?
Comments: 2
9:38 am 5th August, 2009
I’ve long worried about the way people behave on the internet, and the way they write emails. This is just one of the reasons I’ve not signed up for Facebook yet.
I remember receiving emails from a “friend” a couple of years ago, which seem to have gone through no discernible filtering process on the way out of this friend’s brain. This person was a university graduate, and largely articulate in real life – why then, was it so difficult to email me with anything coherent? All I can imagine, should I sign up for Facebook, is that I’ll end up with this kind of rubbish all over my account, until I work out how to avoid it!
I try to make sure that what I submit to the internet leaves me feeling no shame.
Comments: 1
1:32 am 5th January, 2010
I am starting to be more and more selective concerning who I connect to as “you are your friends” – the people on your friendlist is a part of the picture people are getting of you as a person.
I do also every two weeks go over my Facebook pages and do a cleaning, removing old info and such – all in the name of keeping a clean, professional picture of me as a person.
The main reason for all the “controlling” is based on that coming employees now Googles people before the interview so no need to have pictures of the last drink-till-you-pass-out party popping up on your name.