I just added you as a contact on Facebook. Yes, I agree, FB is creepy, but as my husband put it, currently “Facebook IS the Internet.” So I go there to stay in the know, delete things from my wall regularly, check my privacy settings often.

Janet and John

I tried Facebook because I was on a CCCC committee that wanted for some reason to hold meetings there. One of the first questions they ask is what high school you went to and when you graduated. I naively answered those questions and suddenly there were pictures of all sorts of people I hadn’t seen in 35 years in the sidebar and it was asking if I wanted to be their friends. I found this really creepy, so I started deleting information, and was surprised to find that everything I did was being written to my wall. I ended up disabling almost all of the “features,” and my Facebook page is pretty much non-functional. Even so, people find it and want to be my “friends.” I complained about this to the instructional designers in I&IT last quarter, and they said, in unison, almost in harmony, “Welcome to Facebook!” I am thinking of deleting the account. I haven’t visited it in several months.

I haven’t tried Twitter, but last quarter I kept getting messages that purported to come from one of my students saying, “Jenny wants to follow you on Twitter.” I asked her about this, and it seems that she had inadvertently given Twitter access to her address book, and Twitter was using it to recruit new members.

I guess I don’t trust either of these companies. I still find Facebook very creepy. I don’t like anything about it.

You may be right that blogging is already old hat. YouTube seems to be what people want. Even when I post guitar tracks, a lot of people would rather watch a low-resolution video with crappy sound than a well-mixed hi-fi audio track. They want to see something. The visual is dominant, preferably the moving visual, and soon the 3D moving visual.

My blogging was more about trying to be useful than about expressing anything. Perhaps it is not useful. But I don’t think that Facebook is the answer. I hope not anyway! If it is, I will pass.

Thanks for your comments, though! You are undoubtedly right.

I split up my blogging time between separate professional and personal blogs, mainly for privacy reasons, though I have revisited the divide many times, wondering if it’s really necessary. For now it stays. In the last couple of years I’ve further split my attention between Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter allows short status messages for public or subscription-only consumption, and many companion websites have popped up that allow Twitter users to post other content, such as longer posts, photos, and videos. Twitter allows conversations among Twitter users through the use of @name, a syntactical feature that’s so recognizable, it’s become common usage among non-Twitterers as well.

FB allows short status messages or links to other content, longer blog-like posts, photos, videos, and sophisticated privacy settings that allow you to make things public, private, or a split between the two. You can connect your blog to FB in a couple of different ways. One is to set up automatic imports into your FB notes. Another is to link to your blog’s RSS feed so whenever you blog, your FB friends see a link to your latest entry. FB allows conversations through the use of comments, or visitors can write on your “wall.”

I link to my FB and Twitter accounts from my blogs. Most of my readers arrive on my blogs through searches as well, but a few arrive via FB and Twitter, and some go to my FB and Twitter from my blogs. I’m taking a wait-and-see approach on whether to continue blogging. For now I’m holding on to them, mainly because I feel strongly attached to the domain names.

Happy new year! I hope you enjoy going back to teaching. I have fond memories of lit theory, and I know your sci fi class will be a popular one.