Facebook and others have there ups and downs

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When it comes to a friendship site like Facebook, for example, there is good news and bad news.

GOOD NEWS: Yes, you can communicate easily with others and not have to wait for a letter. And yes, you can reconnect with those you haven't seen in 10 or more years.

BAD NEWS: More and more people are exercising less and less. People don't hang out as much as they use to. There was a time in the 1980s when I saw lots of people outside, and engaged in a great many social activities, especially sports. Who does that now, with this constant interconnectivity. On Facebook, you have a total of 14,726 friends, and you don't even know who the hell most of them are, and you'll never know, nor will you send messages. No wonder it's so much harder for those with autism and AS to communicate effectively in the real world.

Friendship was never meant to be a commodity.

On a more cheery note, I think everyone can laugh at this headline....

http://www.theonion.com/articles/mark-z ... ker,18633/

You stole these words from my mouth, brother.

When I first joined Facebook, I had some people I knew in the past send me some nice messages, but then I never heard from them again. I don't find that Facebook has been a good way to reconnect or keep in touch, it's just another void where there is no real connection.

I dislike Facebook - I have a lot of my friends on there...now I don't use my online journal/they don't use theirs so we know even less about what is going on in each others lives, and most of my friends seem to communicate less and less with both me and each other, and what little communication there is becomes so shallow. You can be removed from others friends list without any explanation, which is petty to complain about but a little hurtful when it is someone you actually know.

People don't really know the people on their friends list, that's fine, but there's no communication between anyone it seems (lots of your privet posts being displayed to friends of friends though, which is just great), it's all about popularity - I am not a number! I have lots of random's on my friends list on Facebook too...now say for example ten years ago, I made friends by talking to totally random people on ICQ and that worked...on Facebook again you get this shallow communication if any, and as well as killing off online journals it seems to have killed off instant messaging via ICQ, YIM and MSN too.

I can see all the 'normal' people having fun, with lots of friends - I don't 'get' fun, I rarely get to socialise and have fewer friends than some others so this makes me depressed/lonely, and other people can now see from my profile that I have few friends, no social life, and have little going on right now - YEY!

I agree with you guys. I don't understand why people have 300 something friends on Facebook. People also end up addicted to Facebook. I was once addicted for a while. I realized it took up my life and I said "Hey, I need to put a stop to this." Since I know I lack the will power to go on sparingly, I deactivated the account. Here, as whoever said, we talk about real issues. There it IS a popularity contest "Oh I have more friends than YOU". Have you guys ever heard of quality over quantity? I consider myself a minority, only thirteen and not addicted to Facebook.

BUT with social networking sites and the like, our social interaction in any meaningful real way becoming less, and our means of updating friends/family on how we're doing is restricted to a 140 character limit...we socially inept lot are a bit better off

[waits for someone with the 'we on the spectrum are the next stage of human evolution, we are the real X-men!' mentality to determine this argument is thus proof of autistic superiority - jk]

Or is Allstar a bit of a softy with a want for real community?

I don't get "social networking." They need to write me a handbook on it, with a lot of flowcharts and graphs and maybe then I can comprehend it. Keep in mind, I've been meeting with people via the internet since the 80's. I'm an old fart in internet terms. I love the internet for talking and connecting to people. I've embrace every medium for talking to people over the internet that's come around, except for one--social networking. I don't get it. It doesn't feel like any other form of communicating with other people that has existed on the internet before. It seems so soulless, vacuous and unreal.

Needless to say I am not on Facebook. Never have. It creeps me out. Who needs to know who i know and who "friends" me? Why can't I make online friends or contacts without worrying about data mining and corporate/employer spying? That Zuckerberg guy's a sociopath. Who else would think people are that desperate to look popular, and turn around and exploit it mercilessly?

I personally don't get Twitter...it really confuses me even after creating and posting on an account.

But Mercurial - Facebook also once confused me, after some time I came to understand the Facebook, it became part of my life, it is precious to me...come, become one of US....join us....join us....join us...jk

I pretty much use Facebook as a social calendar since I get connected to a lot of various people in the St. Louis music scene and they send everyone invites to shows. I have a day planner book but it's pretty much grown obsolete.

I'm not on Facebook. I don't think I'd like it.

A couple of times in the past few years, I've had something that I wanted to share with the handful of people I know. The first time was two years ago when I made a Lego stop-motion movie which I was very proud of. The second time was when I wanted to share my account of an important event in my life. Both times, I created a blog to display the information, and emailed a link to it to my friends and family.

Each time, if I got any response at all, it was just a one-liner. People said things like, "Cool. I'm happy for you."

Getting shallow responses like that is really disheartening to me. I don't want to communicate with people at all if it's going to be like that. I wanted questions and in-depth comments. I wanted ongoing dialog, and for my friends and family to feel a sense of connection with me. I had taken a risk by opening up and sharing my creative work and inner thoughts with them. The trite one-liners I got in response sounded like, "I saw that thing you posted, and don't care enough to respond properly."

Anyway, that tells me that I would hate Facebook. I don't feel lonely when I'm alone, but I would feel very lonely if I suddenly found myself looking at a page of 100+ "friends" saying things like, "I just used the toilet" or "My CD is scratched." (Actually, I have no clue where I'd get 100 "friends". I can name about 50 people I've known in my life, if I try really, really hard--but those aren't necessarily people I liked or people who would know me from a hole in the ground.)

There's probably a sort of hyperactivity to the mentality of how people communicate in Facebook. You kill yourself writing paragraphs but someone else can say "Cheese!" and then get 40 responses.

What irks me about Facebook is how people deal with their friend requests. I hate it when you send a friend request to someone and it just sits there. I hate it even worse when they add people as friends, even after you have submitted your request. Your friend request justs sits there in limbo. I can understand if it is someone that you don't know, or know very well, but it drives me nuts when it is a person that I have, or have had some type of relationship with.

Also, I don't quite understand wall posts. I can formulate a well crafted message, or post an article of interest and no one replies. But someone will post a one word answer or something asinine, the whole world responds to it. I also hate it when you post something on a friend's wall that you think would be of interest to them, and they never respond to it.

When someone posts on my wall its happy day.