Well, I can honestly say that I never saw this one coming. I’m on facebook now. I have always avoided the social networking sites because I thought that they were a waste of time (and…well… they are). I do have a MySpace page but I pretty much ignore it. I only wanted it because, if MySpace ever became cool, I wanted to snag the page name “myspace.com/dickdonohue” (yea, it’s an ego thing). There are a lot of really ugly MySpace pages and that didn’t help the coolness factor. But now, with 90,000 sex offenders getting kicked off, it doesn’t appear that most people will be viewing MySpace as a cool place any time soon. Just to be clear: I’m saying that hanging out where sex offenders hang out is not cool. I’m not saying that now that all the sex offenders have left, the place has no appeal!
But facebook has really surprised me. It started when a friend created a facebook group for the band I’m in (Great Buncha Guys). Then one of the other guys in the band invited me to join facebook. So I figured I would create an account and it would be just another social networking site to ignore. For the next 2-3 days my email was flooded! I’ve hooked up with old high school and college friends, friends from church and all over. I admit that it has been fun to go back and reconnect with some folks.
For me, facebook has proven to be an interesting adventure in social science. And it has me fascinated. I’ve been spending a lot of time on facebook lately. (I’m sure that it is an unhealthy amount of time.) Here are some observations that I have found particularly interesting: continue reading…