Webupon

I was reading about the multitudes of people who have joined FaceBook and other social networks and are “sharing” their lives, often inappropriately. They often behave as if this is a requirement of modern life…you jump online and spill your guts for the world to see.

My question is…why?

Time was, people liked to keep some things private.  When kids went off to college usually their parents didn’t know all they were up to or they’d have been yanked home in a hurry.  Now, parents are sharing the details, and passing out their own.

Kids would rather not know about mom and dad having sex; mom and dad would probably rather not know the same about the kids.

And the big thing to me is…what is driving people to want to share every aspect of their lives? People are giving up time and privacy to look “cool” or something like that. We wouldn’t want anyone to know we don’t belong to the social networks. It’s like a mortal sin now if you don’t FaceBook, MySpace or Twitter.

Well, I don’t, and I probably won’t. I don’t need 5000 or 50,000 or 500,000 “friends” who aren’t really friends at all. A handful of really good friends is all most of us need in life.  I don’t even attend family reunions because I don’t want to know some of my cousins and what they are doing, and I don’t want them knowing everything I am doing.

Besides…where do people find the time to do this? How many hours a day are spent communicating the details of your life to people who probably don’t care?

It’s like a sickness now…hop on there and  make a comment. Never mind it’s a stupid, rude, crude, unfeeling, uncaring comment…gotta do it anyway.

Social networking has become more of a drug than a diversion.

It’s already led to a lot of dire consequences.  Parents learning things they’d rather not know, kids discovering things about their parents they really would rather not know…neighbors, co-workers, bosses getting ugly surprises…vicious, cruel remarks being thrown around like a handful of snowflakes.

The world as it used to be may be gone but it’s not too late to recover civility…it’s not too late to say goodbye to invasions of privacy that are too painful to be revealed. Maybe in many cases it’s time to push the off button…cut down your list of “friends” to the few you know really are. The game of accumulating friends has become as useless as collecting soda cans, chewing gum wrappers and ticket stubs.

More is not always better and the time given up in pursuit of “sharing” is time lost when you could be doing something you really like from walking the dog to hugging your kids to spending an evening at a club, bar or restaurant with “real people”. Most of us see enough of our relatives at Thanksgiving and other holidays without telling the world Aunt Kate has hemorrhoids, Uncle Bill steals office supplies or your roommate Katie had sex with her boss. Whatever happened to minding your own business?

In the case of many older people I think it would be a good thing if they left some of these sites to the young folks and quit trying to “belong” to a generation they aren’t part of anymore. Young people will always be rebellious, outrageous, daring, shocking and unconventional but it’s not an attractive way for mature, older, maybe retired people to behave.

If your daughter is in college you’d probably rather not know all the facts about her existence…even more than wanting a degree or a future, most young people want to go to college to “escape” parents, home, and constant supervision…and here Mom pops up wanting to know what you meant by THAT comment you made and why are you doing so and so?

Can you remember when, back in school, most of us wanted to crawl under the desk and hide when parents came to your class? Can you remember the holiday dinner when some old aunt would come up and make some remark about how much you look like dead cousin Jane?  It made you feel a little like the kid in A Christmas Story who got the big pink bunny suit.

Lots of people are joining social networks for a small number of reasons…wanting to know things no one has bothered to tell them, wanting to make sales, wanting to look popular, wanting to feel important, wanting to not feel so alone in what is becoming a scary world.

Personally, I prefer real life.