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When I was a pre-teen in Puerto Rico we had slam books – a composition book that you posed a question and your friends answered in it, along with other notes that accumulated in them. Where those slam books are now I have no idea. When I first got on My Space it was only due to intellectual curiosity and so it was that I followed the social media path reluctantly to Facebook because I didn’t see any reason to be spending time I didn’t have writing about things that possibly only one person cares about, namely me, and so I stayed on Facebook long enough to know that I found no purpose in being on there. Then later I came back to Facebook because of events I wanted to be updated on and I liked the fact that FB created a platform for you to keep track of nonprofessional events.

In the last week, I have had two interesting conversations:

ONE – Two young men, in their late twenties, told me they would be willing to ditch their cable TV, their journal subscriptions, and any news feed but they would not ditch Facebook, that they would pay upward of $30 a month to be on Facebook because it was so important to their friendships.

TWO – A father of a two year old son and an 11 year old daughter said he nor his wife is on Facebook because they want to set an example to their kids that socializing is something that is not done through a digital medium, face time is valued over typed messages.

At the end of the day it is about finding value in what you do. I have had conversations with a cashier at the K&B that made me reconsider my entire life, while for some engaging in most conversations is a painful and arduous task. It doesn’t matter if you are doing it digitally or in a spiral back composition book, the value of the dialogue is what is important, not the medium. I like blogging and I sort of dislike the chit chat of social media, but I like going on Facebook to learn about things that my friends’ know about like a good show that is coming up or some great music they heard or even news that hasn’t made its way through any of my feeds.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2011 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.