Social Networks

Boy am I sick of social networking sites. I thought going away to college provided me with the opportunity to leave all the people from my hometown behind and start to meet some new and interesting people instead. Now, in this age of social networking, not only can I not escape these douchbags, but they know everything about me! They know where I went last night, because some dumb broad snapped 1000 pictures and posted them already. They know who I'm talking to, the inside jokes that I have with my REAL friends, and everything else in between. A huge part of me wants to rid myself of Facebook and all of the other online bullshit that's a complete invasion of my privacy. But I can't do it. Why? Because it's an enormous part of society. No Facebook is comparable to no cell phone, no debit card, no driver's license... NO IDENTITY. So that's out of question.

But getting to the article here, I liked how they broke everything down. Every definition and explanation they gave was extremely detailed, and although it became tough to decipher everything with one read-through, when you picked out key sentences and read them over again, there was some great information there. I even learned a bunch of SNSs (ooh, how trendy) I'd never even heard of before. When you take a look at the history of it all (mostly from the Mainstream MySpace section to the part about the emergence of Facebook), it's extremely interesting at how this whole phenomenon caught fire. These networks caught on so fast that it's difficult to document off the top of your head all the changes that took place. Facebook went from uppity Harvard pricks to college students to high school kids to now my freakin mom and all her sisters stalk all my pictures. How awesome is it when your Mom knows that you're going on a drunken bus trip to Providence before you're even sure you are? Good joke, it sucks. Thanks pop culture.

My only question: What's next? The landscape of these social networking sites is so fast-changing that it's tough to say. As they say in the 'Future Research' section, the discussion is ongoing and extremely difficult to quantify. All I know is that eventually it's going to get to a point where I'm gonna lose my mind. When I kick the addiction, I'll let you know.