The good news is, for me at least, that I can't find myself on Facebook. I am one of the thousands of people that have fake names on Facebook. Why? For the same reason that I wouldn't buy a house in Linden Woods with a back yard that practically encroaches on three other backyards: I really enjoy my sense of privacy.
There is a bit more to it. When I joined Facebook, it was probably within the first 3 weeks that it came about. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into when I joined. As it turned out, after a while, Facebook turned in to this crazy information sharing site, one where people that you barely know can now get intimate information about you.
There is a bit of a misconception, I think, about the amount of control you actually have over your Facebook existence. Consider this: You go out one night and you have a tremendously good time. Throughout the evening, somebody has unintentionally taken a picture of you telling a joke. You know, the joke where the punch line involves you making some sort of questionable face. In context, the face is harmless, it's actually a very funny joke, but taken out of context (someone creeping on your Facebook page) it might seem like you're misbehaving.
After the party, said camera person went home and decided to post all of their photos to a new Facebook group they just created, called "Tammy's Crazy Sexy Going Away Party". And there you are, in picture number two, in the background, doing the punch line to that hilarious joke, with a beverage in your hand. How stoopid did you look? You didn't do anything wrong. You were in an adult environment, enjoying adult conversation and you told a joke to a selective group of people... I use the word selective very loosely of course, because in this case, selective isn't what you thought it was.
So the picture is up on Facebook, for everyone to see. And I am convinced that their are some people that spend WAY too much time on Facebook. People that probably look at every picture that has ever been posted, anywhere on Facebook. CREEPY!
Even if you ask the person to take the photo down, or you complain to Facebook, the picture has already been out in "interland" for a while. Long enough, possibly, for someone to take the photo out of context and, ultimately, it changes your relationship, whether you know it or not, with that person forever.
So the moral of the rant is that you should never go out and have fun, or let yourself get a little crazy from time to time. Or no, wait, the moral is that if anybody takes pictures at a party, they should either be paying tremendous amounts for your photos, or they should be beaten to within an inch of their lives. Ok, so these solutions are terrible.
How is it safe to have a profile on Facebook if you can't LITERALLY control every piece of media that goes out there?
It sucks too, cause Facebook is a fun way to stay in touch with people. And it's fun to look at party pictures too. But I can certainly think of a few ways that it would be easy for me to get photos that could tarnish people's reputations. So how hard would it be for a stranger to get that info? We've all seen the police use Facebook photos to link criminals together; and there they are, on the six o'clock news.
Twitter isn't really like that. There's no medium, really, for people to post stoopid drunk pictures of you. I mean, if somebody is trying to sabotage your reputation, the internet would be a pretty easy place to start. But Twitter wouldn't be the first place to look.
There's just as many ways to get caught being stoopid on Twitter, but most of them involve defamation.The police can't really use Twitter to make links between actual friends, that may be involved in some criminal activity.
Twitter also seems, at least so far, to be a better source for getting news. And I find that there's less shameless self promotion on Twitter. With Facebook, every banal cause, or company has a Facebook page. So much so, that like billboards and TV commercials, you could make the argument that they are nearly ineffective. But that is certainly up for debate.
My Twitter account comes up third when I Google my name, Manitoba Music directory is first, and LinkedIn profile is second. I really should up date that profile, along with a half dozen other profiles from various sites that I've joined over the years.
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