Social Networks

I've have been having a Facebook account for a while now - actually only because my best friend kept bugging me about it. She was right thought, after having moved over here, Facebook seemed like a great medium to stay in touch. So I filled in the gaps and added some pictures.

After a while (I actually gathered some friends) I started receiving those mails from Facebook: "Someone wrote on your Fun Wall!", "Someone has sexy flirted with you!" and "You've been poked!". Hhmm... I wondered: What is a Fun Wall and where would I possibly have a thing like this? Flirting? If someone flirts with me, I usually realize this. And poke?? When did I get poked? So I ignored those mails for quite a while and deleted them. Just did not make too much sense to me.

But! Last week in class w got assigned to "go further" or "try new things" concerning social media. Instead of opening another account on myspace or any other of these platforms, I was going to actually read all the Facebook emails and see what's behind them.
Turns out: Some of them are games that can be played over time with friends on Facebook. Others are applications that - not sure, but I think - allow you to goof around with other friends having the same applications in their profile. So I spent about two whole hours replying all those requests, pokes, Fun Walls and anything else that piled up in my Inbox on Facebook.

Honestly, I got bored after a while. Especially since I seem to have two different kinds of friends in my Facebook: The ones I can send all kinds of crap to play with and the ones that might get annoyed by me forwarding all that stuff. So I had only a few possibilities to choose from when doing all those games and applications. Since the game often requests that you forward things to 8 - 15 friends, I got 8 - 15 friends now who have several requests from me in their mailbox.

Bottom line: Facebook (and I guess it's the same with other social media) is a great tool to keep in touch and see what's going on with some close and less close friends. But if you want to take part in ALL the games, applications and requests, you end up spending soo much time online, that you really only have the Internet and its social media platforms as a social connection to the outer world...