I agree that technology can be abused. After all, that's the plot line of so many movies, right? Some awesome technological discovery, could be used to do so much good, evil guy sees dollar signs through some evil use of said new technology, battle for the new technology ensues. Inevitably, there is always discussion about whether new technology is "good" or "bad", which of course is always an over simplification. I don't think technology itself is inherently good or bad, but rather its application can be good or bad.
Email, which amazingly is "old school" by today's standards, is a great tool. I can still remember trying to write a letter and feeling like I had to fill two pages front and back to make it a respectable letter. That standard (thankfully) didn't translate to email. Sending a two or three-line email is totally acceptable, and therefore it makes it much easier to keep in touch. I think it helped people communicate more, because rather than NOT writing letters, at least they send an email occasionally.
Ed addressed the misuse of email. "Shit sludging" (I just coined that phrase) is the worst abuse. Some people spend their lives never composing anything on email, but instead FORWARD loads and loads of crap. In reference to the cheesy email that we all got the other day, I always wonder who the person was that spent all the time to put it together! At any rate, there is no shortage of people that will forward all manner of crap to every email address they have stored in their address book. That's just one abuse. There are also solicitation emails (thank god for spam filters), phishing scams, outright lies (Barrack Obama refuses to sing the National Anthem), and other nuisances. So, any user of the technology that is email needs to have a good understanding of it and how to properly use it so that they don't fall victim of its abuse, or become abusers themselves.
Let's talk about Facebook (FB). Brad, pay attention. You might learn something. FB is not the same as a letter. It's not the same as email, and it's not the same as a phone call or anything else. It's a unique technology that has its own set of rules. And it's very frustrating when people don't understand those rules.
First, the very appeal of FB is that you can "keep in touch" with hundreds of people at the same time. Not the "keep in touch" of our Mom and Dad's generation. A majority of my "friends" on FB are people that I will never call on the phone, they'll never get a Christmas card from me, and they'll never come over for dinner. FB is a means to "keep in touch" with people through one-line interactions on totally random subjects.
People use FB to post different types of information. Some of it I like, some of it I don't. A great thing about FB is that it provides the "hide" tool. If you don't like seeing what some people post, you can simply "hide" them. You are still friends with them, and although you'll never see anything they post, they are none the wiser! It prevents a potential awkward situation of having to tell someone that you don't want to hear from them anymore. I only bring that up because I've offended real-life friends in the past by asking them to remove me from their email list (I got tired of all the stupid forwards). You don't have to do that with FB. Some people I interact with fairly often on FB because their comments spur my thinking, make me laugh, or are just plain entertaining. Those that I "hide" are usually people who are overly political (constant right or left-wing rants), over-the-top sappy (my wife is the sweetest 50 times a day), exceedingly boastful (today I ran 17 miles, then saved a drowning puppy, then taught my 2-year-old how to read), or tediously boring (I'm going to eat some toast, wash the dishes, cut my toenails, then walk my dog). For all I know half of my "friends" have hidden me. I'm okay with that. I don't have an expectation of level of contact on FB.
Now for my personal frustrations… I use FB as a totally informal tool. So when I "talk" so someone on FB, meaning that I made a comment on someone's post or they commented on mine), it doesn't mean that I have chosen that person as some kind of special friend. It's almost like small talk passing someone in the hallway at work. I don't expect that EVERYONE else will know about it. But at the same time I recognize that posting on FB you have to assume that anyone else COULD see it. A good example was last week when my "friend" in Spain (I haven't seen him since about 1999) made a comment on one of my posts asking if we were still planning on visiting Spain this month. I had made a comment to him in October (on FB) that we MIGHT be going to Spain in November and that maybe we could meet for coffee if we did. Mom read that and felt "out of the loop" because she didn't know we were considering going to Spain. We didn't really tell anyone else that we were thinking of going, but since she saw on FB that someone else knew about it, Mom thought she had missed out. She assumed that a passing comment to a FB friend meant that I was keeping him "in the loop" on my life and leaving her out. The problem is just that I don't think she understands how people use FB. I don't use it as a news outlet, and the people that I talk to through FB have no exclusivity or special association for me.
I think I've gone on long enough for this round.
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