Social networks...

I used to loath the idea of social networking.

Being a bit shy myself I usually do not lend my self to having many real life acquaintances. Outside of my own classroom environment, I rarely try to socially interact with new people. This is a personal life style choice that makes me comfortable.I was late to catch on the whole Social Networking wave because of this.

Yet now I currently use two major social networks, twitter and more recently Facebook.

I enjoy Twitter's short concise form. Of course you can share a huge amount of information through twittering your favorite links and media, for me the soul of twitter was always the 140 character long short message format. This format compels one to be concise and direct, so I found it to be more manageable. This format also lends itself to compel the writer to think a bit more before posting. I don't Twitter that much these days but I don't have that many negative views of Twitter

I joined Facebook just before going to Japan to keep up with my students. At first it was quite nice to "seem" to be in contact with students through reading their status updates and postings.

After a while, it became very difficult to keep up with all the information, especially when checking Facebook each day becomes more and more consuming and starts turning your friends postings from something to keep you informed and connected and eventually emotionally happy to a form of distraction and entertainment.

I think social networking in its essence is a good medium that has only been made possible with the internet being what it is today, but is very dangerous at the same time. It is a double edged sword at its finest. It is like a very sharp tool, you gain so much from using it wisely and carefully but you can get really messed up if you underestimate the ability of this tool to do harm to its user.

One very important rule of thumb for me is to accept friend invites from people I personally know well in the real world. The few times I ignored this rule led to quite socking revelations that might have been avoided. This might seem in direct contradiction to the core "spirit" of social networking, but I think it is the safest and least problematic way to utilize it in accordance to our values and society.