Tweet? No, thanks…

Good morning, Netizens…

David Horsey’s cartoon of the day certainly hits a sore spot in my repertoire, because although I spent years talking to total strangers on the CB radio, a shortwave radio, Usenet news and e-mail, for some strange reason I have avoided these social networking schemes such as Facebook and Twitter. Somehow it seems a total waste given the amount of time I otherwise spend communicating with other people I don’t know when I could be talking with people I do know. Granted, Twitter has some limited uses for live news broadcasts, but my personal preference is to leave Tweets for our feathered friends, and I don’t even have a Facebook page.

I guess the questions for me are:

If I am satisfied with my wife-for-life and my narrow circle of friends, why should I cast my net further afield in search of someone else? Sometimes I wonder if I spend enough time with them as it is; due to constraints of work and writing, time seems to simply slip away from me as it is.

If I can talk directly to my wife or friends, why should I add another electronic geegaw to the various methods I already employ because it is the latest rage? Personally, I don’t give a damn about the latest fads, because they inevitably change into something else and in some cases never fulfill their purpose to begin with.

Perhaps the biggest concern for me is that of privacy, something which as we have seen over the last six months or more, in the worlds of social networking, privacy sometimes simply ceases to exist. While I’m quick to admit any proof of the lack of privacy in the online community is nebulous and often unprovable, I also know, based upon previous experiences, that anything written online is discoverable under law, and therefore what you say can be held against you.

Somewhere in that great nebulous electronic village things you may have written years ago are waiting, carefully guarded, and waiting to come back to haunt you.

Dave