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Jul 11, 2010

Revitalization and the Social Network.

Over the last couple of months, I have come to a realization:

Facebook has been completely detrimental to my blogging.

Over the course of about two years, I was a routine blogger. I had not a care in the world about posting; indeed, I would type out a post like a musician plays the piano. Imagining the letter keys to be the ebony and ivory of a keyboard, posts on various and sometimes completely random subjects would find there way into the blogosphere in much the same way as a piano concerto fills a concert hall.

But suddenly, and unexpectedly, I thought I had lost my voice. No matter how I tried, I simply couldn’t get myself motivated to actually post something. Surprisingly, I can actually pin it down to one event that caused such a tragic decline in something I really enjoyed: the creation of my Facebook account.

Social networking is, in and of it self, more invasive than the crab grass in my lawn outside. It’s in everything. You can access it from any computer on the planet with even the slowest of internet connections. My android phone has an app for it that makes it even easier to post status updates on the go. Even my XBOX 360 has a link, so I don’t even have to get up off my couch and look for either my phone or the laptop.

Really? Have we, as a society really made our lives this fricking easy? Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the social aspect of Facebook, and firmly intend to make use of it in the future. I really like the way it’s made it so easy to reconnect with friends from my past with whom I have lost contact over the years.

Sadly, a quick post here and there to the status bar became a regular and easy process, and I suddenly felt as though I had nothing important to say. Or at the very least, I was feeling quite redundant.

So Facebook became the regular thing, and D constantly made fun of me for being part of a social network she classified as a “juvenile” endeavor. I won’t even get into the fact that my Facebook page has been overrun with Farmville and Vampire Wars postings (all because of her). I’m pretty sure most of my friends completely ignore anything I post because of the sheer volume of these games by Zynga. But that is really a whole other subject in and of it self. Lets get back on track.

So I have attempted, here and there, to revitalize my blogging. And I rarely post to Facebook anymore anyway. And even when I do, my posts simply disappear in a deluge of Zynga game spam about mystery eggs and vampiric assaults. Yeah, I know that sounds crazy, but it is what it is.

(Case in point: as I am typing this I received an email from Zynga letting me know I received a mystery gift from a person on my friends list.)

Then, the other day, I noticed my dear friend Iver managed to do exactly what I have been kicking around for months, he started posting again. Yes, I admit, some amount of jealousy ensued. And why not? I have been wanting to do exactly the same thing for a while now, but to no avail. But its not just the fact he managed to post something, it’s the fact he somehow linked it to his Facebook profile.

Is this perhaps the perfect union between a love/hate relationship with Facebook and my long lost friend, my blog? Perhaps, only time will tell. As it stands, I have set so many goals for myself and very few of them have I actually accomplished (OK, lets be honest, if my goal was to sleep more, I might have accomplished that one).

So, here I go again. back into the blogosphere. There will be more to follow. Now, if I can just figure out how I can get this post to show on my Facebook profile....

****Small udate****

Getting this to post to my facebook profile has not been the easiest thing in the world to do (no thanks in part to IT, who has blocked Facebook from the county internet).  I'm working on it.  Really, I am.

3 comments:

  1. Yay! Welcome back to the fold. I do believe you are on to something about the lack of creative output and involvement in other social networking like Facebook (or in my case, Twitter). Whereas I used to post a couple of times a week, I am now lucky to post twice a month.

    I wish you luck in your resolution to get writing and posting again. I look forard to the inspiration.

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  2. YAY! VOR is BAAaaack! I so enjoy your writing. jm

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  3. You expressed in exact words what I've been thinking for months now. I'm going through the same thing. When I compare the two things, my blog matters more to me, but FB tends to win out because of how easy and quick it is. The kids all go to school in one week from today and getting back on the blog bandwagon is top on my "to do" list.

    ReplyDelete

You went to all the trouble to get yourself here, you might as well say something about it.

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