The Facebooks

A while ago I commented about disengaging somewhat with "the Facebooks" (said with an Eastern European accent, a-la Peggy). You can link to that posting HERE.  This whole notion of social media disengagement is both fascinating to contemplate and almost counter-intuitive in this day and age. Never the less I can report some minor degrees of success...

...I am spending less time basically using the Facebooks as a kind of visual muzak.

...I recently and significantly culled my herd of Facebook "likes". To the social media uninitiated, these are pages on the Facebooks that are either for a (famous...of the major or minor sort) person or organization.

To the second point, a few specific examples stand out:

• One of my first quasi-friends on the Facebooks was an author that I am rather fond of, but alas, her postings tended to be either advertisements for her writing seminars or inside jokes that, for the most part, I either didn't get or didn't want to get.  Gone.
• Equally gone?  WILK.  Yes, this is about the second or third time that I've "liked" the local talk-radio station, but this time it's a permanent separation.  I got tired of the "Limbaugh-wannabe" in the morning and the "I am intentionally controversial" liberal in the afternoon.  I actually did, for the most part, enjoy Sue Henry's postings, but with WILK it's all a package deal.  
• I tried to cull all of the "likes" that seemed steer targeted advertisements from the geniuses at the Facebooks to my wall.  Sorry Mr Zuckerberg, I'll figure out what I like all on my own, thank you very much.

Now it wasn't a complete purge, as I kept some of the news feeds, The Onion and George Takei (who has some of the best stuff out on the entirety of the Facebooks).

The ironic part to all of this?  I'm on something of a quest at work to get my colleagues to embrace social media technologies and social learning. Yes, professionally I'm pushing people towards this kind of thing and personally I'm moving away from it.  It's an odd world out there.