Facebook

I didn't post about Facebook after the lecture last week, and so I'm gonna jump on the bandwagon and write down my feelings about it now.

I really like Facebook. A lot. It's so wonderful to be able to keep in touch with friends and stay updated with their lives. It's also pretty fun to Facebook-stalk people. But I will admit that I probably spend a bit too much time on it. It's so easy to get distracted by looking at pictures and sending messages and writing on people's walls instead of doing homework. I definitely need to work on getting a bit more self-control in that regard.

Another interesting note... as I was defending the use of Facebook to someone, I was saying that I'm able to find out a lot of what's going on in the lives of my friends. I've found out about several engagements, pregnancies, illnesses, and whatnot on there. And it's really good to know that information. But as I said that, I wondered why that mattered. I mean, if I were really friends with them, I would find out this information with or without a Facebook, right?

The social penetration theory definitely makes sense to me in regards to Facebook. It's easy to be a friend on Facebook, but I pretty much always have my Facebook chat off because I don't want to talk to most of them in that way, anyways. And I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable texting or calling most of my "friends." And that's with going through my friends list every so often and deleting people that I'm really not sure why I added them in the first place. But somehow, I always end up adding more people and my friend count keeps going up. Do I really have 400 friends? I mean... really. That's kind of ridiculous. Oh well.

But despite some of Facebook's problems, I'm not planning on giving up mine anytime soon. I like it too much. :-)