What's the deal with "Social Networking?"

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It just seems like baseball card collecting to me. A name, a face, some stats. A prolonging of that much-anticipated end-of-the-school-year tradition of yearbook signature collecting. It seems cheap and artificial.

Isn't a "Profile" little more than a shrine to one's self? Look at my followers, my shiny stuff. Like how the bachelor bower bird spends most of it life searching far and wide for blue baubles and spending hours arranging them in his lair according to a mysterious feng shui, people tend to their profiles. Hitting refresh, refresh, refresh, uploading many photos of their most flattering angles.

Acquaintances will ask, "do you have a FacebookTwitterMyspace?" Why, no sorry. Our awkward conversation inevitably loses steam, we part ways, and I miss the opportunity to be an avatar sitting in the bottom right corner of his screen. I'll miss out on his precious by-the-hour two-liners, the inside jokes, the pictures of his Veteran's Day BBQ...

Do you have one of this newfangled internet deals? If so, why? Has this help enhance face-to-face encounters or is it just an RPG based on the real thing?

I have a Facebook, but rarely use it.

I think it's just a monument to oneself. People usually add friends so they can say "Hey, look how many friends are on my friends list!"

I like it for exchanging pictures with family but that's about it-or commenting on a news link. Just last night I posted that I was too busy contemplating my navel to keep up with all the apps. Somebody "sent" me a balloon and I figured I had to put a stop to it.

i play games on facebook i never talk to anyone on there

I find that social networking can be worth it. I am on facebook, though I find that 10% of my facebook friends do 95% of the posting. Its a good way to keep in touch, so long as you realize that a facebook "friend" may just be a passing acquaintance or a distat friend of a friend of a friend. I have made one good online penpal (not from facebook) who I send e-mails to every day. I don't know anything about twitter.
I am a member of a free-of-charge online dating web page. Its mostly a waste of time. The women that I e-mail to rarely reply. I occasionally get e-mails from women e-mailing me first, but most of them are much older than I am. I don't mind too much, since all this nonsense is not actually costing me money.

I used to be on Myspace a couple of years ago but wasn't all that thrilled with it, mainly I found it to be a waste of time. Seemed like a really immature popularity contest for the most part: who can have the biggest friend's list, who is in who's top ten friend's list or whatever. Also, ran into a weird stalker-type there and it got unpleasant and eventually I got rid of my account. People are always bugging me now to get a Facebook account, but so far I've been reluctant to do so. I figure it would be more of the same.

I was very against getting Facebook and resisted for years, but then my friend started blackmailing me, saying they would start an account using my name and post all pictures of me on it (not that there are very many pictures of me. I see a camera, I run.) so I joined because I am somewhat paranoid.

I still don't like it and still don't see the point of it. It's seems like a bit of a competition to see who can get the most 'friends' like you've already said. Half of my 'friends' I barely even knew and I don't speak to them. I can see how it can be good, but I still don't like it all that much.

What's the point of posting things like, "so and so is bored!" or "so and so is about to watch the Xfactor!" (usually with multiple spelling mistakes.) I don't bloody care. I don't care if you about to eat a pork pie or going to go the loo, so don't post it.

My daughter set up my Facebook page before she went off to prep school on the other side of the state. It's useful for keeping in touch with her - unlike me, she is a tremendously social animal with tons of friends both online and in RL - while phone calls often go to voicemail, she will almost always respond to a Facebook email or a text message.

I was shocked at how many people from High School (which was far away in another state) have messaged me to say Hello. Frankly, I didn't think most of those people would even remember me, and in most cases, it's a brief "Hi, howaya" and nothing more - and that's fine, 'cause that's about as much as we interacted back in the day. In a couple of cases, however, I have reconnected with close friends that I had been out of touch with for thirty years, and that's been very nice.

That having been said, however, I do find the constant barrage of mindless posts about going to the beach and the planned tailgate party at the college game and how many cyber animals are on so-and-so's imaginary farm and who just won what in MAFIA WARS and Whomever's proud relationship with their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and so on and so forth to be pathetically, soul-achingly pointless. Is this REALLY what's going on in most people's heads day in and day out? How did creatures so shallow and stupid ever invent computers in the first place?

By retro-engineering alien technology recovered from Roswell of course.

Prediction: One day Myspace, Twitter, & Facebook will all merge into one big social networking site. It will be called "MyTwitFace". Everyone will be limited to one word postings such as "happy", "sad", "comatose", etc. Also, everyone will be required by law to put up numerous photos of themselves engaged in doing very drunken stupid things involving nudity, jello, farm animals, public displays of affection, flamethrowers, and large numbers of people jumping off a cliff.

^

am i honestly the only one here who's found any real benefit in social networking?
Myspace
-good way to keep up and in touch with my friends.
-good way to meet local girls, i've had a few offers, both sexual and relationshipwise from people i got to know initially on there, all's good.
-my family's on there, keeps us together even though we're living in different places now for the most part.
-good way to meet new friends who are interested in me for me (my profile page is a decent representation in some aspects of my personality and if they like that and add me, chances are we typically get along and have common interests. typically it is so)
-i play the app games on there
-i use it's blog to advocate my poetry
-i listen to it's music
-i have musician friends in RL with profiles and i support them on there by helping with their networking
-i make posts about stuff i've learned in life or just generally entertaining stuff, or even just shallow stuff when i'm in such a mood and i get replies. converse, and connect. even if in my limited aspie way.

it's just been an overwhelming plus for me because i use it in every concievable way and press it's every advantage instead of just doing what i guess some of you do and give it a cursory glance, yawn, and say "oh dear, this isn't helping me yet or in flagrantly obvious ways without me putting in the necessary time, effort, & creativity that RL requires because of course online is a magical fantasy land where things just happen of their own accord and totally different"

also it took alot of work to get my profile and everything on there established as i wanted it. alot of tweaking of details. i'm proud of it. though this was over some time too. i learned slowly along the way how to do such things. i wasn't necessarily really good at it right off the bat

A trend I've noticed on Facebook is to announce what you're cooking for dinner but to describe it like you're reading it from a menu at a high end restaurant. Then everyone else has to comment Yum or Sounds wonderful. Maybe one day I'll post cold macaroni and cheese and leftover chicken mmmm.

I use facebook, in fact it's my main access to social life, I see my friends more as a result, when things are not good I can say so, which is better than my previous "don't answer the phone or the door" policy which cost me plenty of friendships. I also know some of my friends far better as a result, as I frequently fail to ask people the most basic of things

Downsides, well I rarely send friend requests because I assume people will not like me. I am also sick of "so and so has found a lost cow on their pretendy farm which they play at because they have too much free time-ville", requests to send hugs to people I actually do not like but daren't remove, and seeing the crude and misspelled attempts at flirting that go on between people I barely know. (Plus I have a slightly mean, easily exasperated streak that makes me want to tell them to just get it on and shut up about it )

I did join OKCupid, which triggered something of a meltdown as I felt harrassed by the pressure of having to respond to people. I know this is awful, some of them were nice, interesting and quite possibly people I would like but i just felt swamped. I haven't got the courage up to revisit the site and delete my profile, which I know probably makes me seem a b***h, but it just seemed out of control and more stress than I could handle

I have a myspace, a facebook profile, and an twitter account but I don't truely fit into the social networking scene. I never expereinced the American Teen Lifestyle because of the following:

-I was bullied for three straight years from the 7th and 9th grades. Thus I had no friends.
-I never had a drivers license thus no car, and mostly stuck in the house after school and weekends
-Never had a part time job during the time.
-Most of my socialization and friends are online.

So while plenty of people enjoy facebook or myspace because they have real friends they know, I don't. Even though I have people who know me, I had no real true friend. Not one in my life. At all. That's why I'm displaced from the actual scene, yet at the same time using the services.

Not to mention using creative photo angles and shading to make themselves look more attractive and "hip".

I don't get social networking stuff either. I have noticed that the people I know who are "successful" on those sites quite often lie, or stretch the truth about things to seem "more cool", or what ever the qualifier is. These are people that I don't know to be dishonest in person either, so I wonder if deception is a common thing with most otherwise "honest" people that use those sites.

Some things I have seen people lie about (Again, I know them IRL, so I know these things to be untrue):
Claiming their dog is a pitbull that is actually a mutt that only slightly resembles one.
Lying about height.
Lying about age.
Stretching the truth about their work status.
Stretching the truth about their university status.
Lying about income level.
Spinning their life history in such a way, and using phrases that makes them seem tougher than they really are. (claiming to grow up "in the projects" when they actually grew up in a low crime if somewhat poor/working class apartment complex, and in a relatively stable family environment)
Not to mention the creative angled photos...(Ok, Guilty!)

Why not just leave inconvenient things blank in the profile? Do all people lie like that on those sites, and is that what is required to get a bunch of "baseball cards" on the friends page? (I love the baseball card comparison, Llixgrjb)

But still if it helps people who have a hard time socially to feel accepted then that isn't a bad thing. I don't get it though.