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10 reasons why I avoid social networking services

Now comes the day when you must confess that you don't network socially online.

As of early 2012 Facebook had over 900 million active users and Twitter had over 500 million active users.

Full disclosure - I was required to use AIM at one of my former jobs. The "bloop" of a new message disturbed me when deep in coding but I learned to ignore it until I could break from what I was doing. I never closed by AIM door. As project lead I considered it essential to be available for my team. It was a good way to communicate. I would use an IM service again if asked. I used Silicon Investor years ago in the late '90s and early '00s (this stuff stays out there forever) and Usenet for a short while in the '90s and a few years ago when learning about hardware. I also had a phpBB forum on my Web site but it flopped and I didn't transition it when changing Web hosting services. I could even use Skype if the terms were reasonable and I didn't have to buy a Webcam.

1. I have privacy concerns - Privacy online is an illusion. Something you say in confidence to your circle of friends can be copied, saved and later passed on to someone outside the circle you'd rather not want to see it. A "private message" sent via the Internet is a misnomer and only an illusion. Messages you may think are private can be disclosed by others, intercepted by hackers or read by big brother.

Sure, it may only be your family and friends that disturb your privacy. They should come first and therein lies the problem - I'm mostly kidding about that. Friends and family can step over the line too. When a school uses their kids to ask family for donations - that's using kids and their family. I've had friends and neighbors trying to sell me water filters and vacuum cleaners. I think I was really kind to them. I didn't throw them out.

First came the telephone and then email. As wonderful as both technologies are, they can be annoying. Now there are all of these newfangled ways your privacy and be disturbed. I know. I sound like an old fogey using the word newfangled. Now where did I put those reading glasses?

2. Ownership of content is unclear - You can do what with my data? I "get" the popularity that people seek by posting their intellectual content on the Web, but who benefits from your efforts? The "15 minutes of fame" you get by posting your content at someone else's Web site might be rewarding to your ego but typically you never directly benefit monetarily. I think that is about to change. You can receive money by posting your content on YouTube but don't expect to get rich. You must apply to the Partner Program - see http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2548877

6. I dont subscribe to social fads - That's one thing Howard Hughes and I have in common - where we got our clothes if you can believe Aviator.

8. I don't need the abuse - Many online discussion forums like Usenet are notorious for anonymous name calling and are not for the thin-skinned.

As always, I will be popping in occasionally to answer any questions and add to the fray when I have something to add that will not be embarrassing to me 20 years from now.

Edit: Fixed item headings and added additional social networking venues. Hmm, I guess I did more social networking when younger than I had remembered.

I keep reminding my wife of these points so that she is careful of what she post.
The other day she said look I'm spying on so and so because of was curious what she said about XYZ. This gave me another opportunity to explain, so do you think she realizes you can see this information just because the two of you have a mutual acquaintance. Please check your security settings!

I've never done social networking for all 10 reasons plus one... Once my psycho ex found my wife on facebook, My wife quickly learned why I have never done social networking on any kind... And after reading three whacked out emails in one day (from the psycho ex... BS about seeing us at a restaurant in Egypt, and weird stuff like that), the wife killed her FB page and never looked back... When people ask me why I don't do social networking, I just tell them it's because I'm not a loser and I have a real life...

"... I'm not a loser and I have a real life". i8thecat4, I'm jealous now. I wish I had said that -- sooner !!!

They wouldn't allow you to turn off sounds? Or at least change them? I change the sounds of incoming and send message to very soft singular "ding" sounds. Very subtle but people love it. The default sounds are a bit over the top.

when several of us on AOL got together and came up with a little gizmo to
automatically respond to IMs. At the height of AOLs market saturation,
it got to the point I found myself "ghosting" more often than not, just to
minimize the number of "Please chat with me" junk IMs I would get.
IMs were handy for quick, short communications, but when everyone
and their dog were using it you could get covered up!

HI pgit

It became a conditioned response to an interruption. It could have been a woman's voice, Aussie, telling me how wonderful I was or Lurch announcing "You rang?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an_by5r8EUc) and I still would have found it annoying after a week or two.

I constantly have to explain to others why I don't use social media and finally just started using "don't like it" as the cover-all excuse. I'm glad someone put these items in a good linear format and comments adding to the subject. You ever heard "get it in writing!"? Well, you made that point here... what you write can be like a stain. I'm a full-disclosure kind of guy and have nothing to hide, but people always think that's why I don't get on facebook. I kind of see it as "You're too lazy to call me and tell me you went out of town for the weekend?" It's too bad I won't login to facebook to see your vaction photos - can you post them somewhere else please? No? oh well - I'm well traveled anyway.
Haha - thanks Mr. Norton.

I share many of your issues with social networking, having successfully avoided Facebook and Twitter thus far. Angry Birds sounds cute, but I think I can resist the temptation. Congratulations on your own triumphs over "the beast." While I did break down and allow non-business relationships to creep into LinkedIn, my professional connections are of no use to most of them, and they tend to keep personal communications relegated to good ol' e-mail.

It's nice to know there are other who feel the way I do about social networking.

I understand what you are saying, yet you blog, which invalidates several of the items you note as reasons for not doing Social Media. Blogging is part of Social Media. See that tool bar at the top of the blog? Tweet, Like, G+? Yea, those. You are USING Social Media to spread the word that you don't like Social Media. Just a tad on the hypocritical side for me. But, to each his own.

Dave

x

CNET, not Alan, is using social media to spread the word that it has an article by Alan regarding his dislike of social media. The content is more of a published article than a true blog, since the editorship and authorship duties rotate.

I've considered "Alan 'Don't call me blogger' Norton" for my headstone but I'll settle for this posting since it too will be written in stone forever. So, no, I do NOT blog.

From the Wiki:

"A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log)[1] is a discussion or information site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often were themed on a single subject. More recently "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, interest groups and similar institutions account for an increasing proportion of blog traffic."

I'm sorry, but you are listed as the author of an on-line blog. You sir, are a blogger. (And that's not a bad thing) As I've been trying to say, you use the tools that make sense for you. I own a hammer, but I am not a carpenter. However, if the only time you see me I have a hammer in my hand, then to you, I am a carpenter.

I prefer to be called "writer" or "author." I find it more respectable than blogger. Blog rhymes with too many words with bad connotations like clog, smog, fog, bog and hog.

Fortunately, TechRepublic agrees with me. The title under my picture is "WRITER" and not "BLOGGER."

From Merriam Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blog: "Definition of BLOG: a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer; also : the contents of such a site"

My writing here at TechRepublic is not a personal journal. Like you say, it's semantics since you are welcome to call me whatever you like.

I fully agree

All arguably good reasons but we're getting to a point where like it or not you need to support it and it is often looked at by employers. Not having bad info is certainly important for that reason but many will also look at the lack of an online presence as an issue as well.

I agree that it has become an addiction for many who seem to feel it is some sort of popularity contest and that anything and everything must be posted.

Gone are the days when the IT department carried any clout for knowing what is harmful. Heck perhaps common sense has been discounted for doing the next cool thing. Technology pundits (that are sometimes unwilling puppets) drive this stuff and then spend the next year(s) saying how they knew it was doomed from the start. Imagine, the year 1923, we all await then next great, newly enhanced toaster ( 1923, 4 years after the invention).

If an employer rejects a potential employee because he or she does not have a listing on a social network site, the employer is doing the potential employee a service. Such invasive employers are not worthy of good employees.

I don't "get" that at all. Except in the narrow case of someone who is being hired to manage or engineer a company's social media presence (in which case a lack of personal presence could reasonably be assumed to indicate a lack of ability to use the tools of the trade), what negative impact could a potential employee's lack of a social media footprint possibly have on a potential employer?

The only online presence I have is here. Why would my non-participation in a social network be an issue to my employer? There are plenty of other activities I also don't engage in; why would social networking be more of an issue than being active in politics, religion, environmentalism, or bowling?

an indication that the interviewee actually planned to come in and do his/her job, instead of posting 'likes', playing XYZ-ville, and dishing to their e-friends.

Look , I hate all this as much as this column describes I'm just pointing out that there is a generation coming into the workplace that has made this a part of how they live and communicate. As screwed up as it is, you can only fight it so far. With that in mind, there are employers who feel they need to embrace these forms of communication. If you are avoiding them then that would be seen as a negative. On the other hand, as noted below, if you work for some higher security organizations then lack of pressence would be a good thing.

Dropped my Facebook in 2008 and have not looked back. I joked to my son, if he gets a Twitter account I would punch him in the mouth (he finds it a joke, not bad for a 18 year old)! To my surprise, my son and a group of his friends dropped Facebook recently, tired of the drama mama's and diva queen postings (woe with me) and mindless rants & personal attaccks, are people beginning to realise how socially inept social networking really is?

Thank you Alan ! I thought I was the only person on the planet that wasn't on Facebook. I am not on facebook for many of the reasons you mention in this article. Being older, I like to keep my private life .. well private. Too many lives and careers have been injury or damage because of Facebook, a lesson this generation is learning the hard way.
It will be interesting to see if the next generation rebels against social media the way my generation rebelled against the establishment.

Thanks

I am surprised that this statistic is so low!

I think the must have set a very, very high threshold as the definition for pointless babble. I bet at least 90% of tweets are pointless babble. But by my own definition Twitter itself is pointless.

There's a few professional tech-types I follow, they apply their knowledge to scouring the web for good information. They provide links I find useful, and I didn't have to do any work to find the info.

I suppose it's a matter of who you follow and why. I don't have any 'personal' use for twitter, but as a professional tool there's nothing else like it.

Your approach to Twitter is the only intelligent one I've found in my travels. If you care to share, I would like to know who you follow - I'm always on the lookout for good sources of technical information, too. If not - I respect your privacy.

I checked out this list and ended up following a couple of them:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/techies-the-top-10-people-you-should-follow-on-twitter/916

I follow Steve Gibson, though he doesn't tweet much:

https://twitter.com/SGgrc
https://twitter.com/SGpad

You'll see a lot of these people don't always post tech stuff, but folks like this do dig up valuable stuff from time to time, eg:

https://twitter.com/msilbey

The Sophos Labs folks always bring something good to the table:

https://twitter.com/SophosLabs

I also check in with a few of the black hat types to see what they are up to, and they also post very good articles from time to time. (I'm don't actually "follow" these though):

https://twitter.com/anonplus
https://twitter.com/anonymousirc
https://twitter.com/plf2012

Most of those types used to post more directly technical stuff, but nowadays they move over to (anonymous) IRC to talk shop, an arena I'm not interested in entering. Still, they find interesting tech stuff occasionally.

It's possible your favorite publications have twitter accounts, a convenient way to see new headlines as they are posted, with a (very) brief summary of the article. The art of enticing someone to read an article based on 140 characters or less has generated some very clever and succinct writing. Much better than browsing to a site and navigating menus stuffed between the ads.

One of my favs: https://twitter.com/theregister/

I do follow a couple non-tech threads, all of them railroad related. Someone sent me a link to a pretty funny "news" video, and I might follow that one, if they make me laugh like that a few more times. The video was about the Higgs Boson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8xUd7Myeuk&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PLA122BEAA1435879C

I know city folk who get tweets from their favorite lunch trucks which tell them which street and cross street they're on each day.

nt

I subscribed to Twitter not for the pointless babble, but because I found out thar there is a small subset use for it. After the problem with the volcanic ash cloud when many stranded people ran up huge mobile internet bills, I started looking around. Some sites use 1-3MB just to load the home page. Then I discovered Lufthansa use Twitter to provide updates on major disruption. This is receiving a tweet on a smart phone is only a few bytes. Since then I have added a few Twitter feeds e.g. from my ISP (who I also use for a number of small businesses) - this posts each exchange that is having a problem (not too many); my coloc centre also now has a Twitter feed.

But I don't suppose these add up to 60%. So what is the 60% - mostly still babble, but not quite pointless, plus a bit of useful info?

Here in the UK there is a TV game show called "Pointless" where you basically have to guess the answer that none of the audience came up with. Twitter is really only the online equivalent of Reality TV.

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In their case, Amtrak's delay notifications would be more like constant streaming. ;^)

Hi Neil. Check the link in the article. It is higher if you add "conversational" to the mix. Both add up to a whopping 78%. "Conversational" is personalized pointless babble, is it not? Some of the other categories could also be considered "pointless babble."

99% of everything on TV is pointless babble (IMO), yet we haven't thrown that out have we? (To be fair, some have!) It's about how you USE the tools at your disposal. We are supposed to be an intelligent species. Make intelligent choices, and use the TOOLS that make sense for you. If someone doesn't use Twitter, I have no problem with that. I find it extremely useful. Just becasue it's useless to you, maybe that just means you are not using it right....

Yes, I probably have been using Twitter wrong. How can I use it right?

I grew up in the days of 4 or 5 TV channels, maximum. It was easy to decide between this limited number of choices. Additional channels only became available in small quantities; the number of options grew at a rate I was easily able to adapt to. I have no way to effectively sort through the millions of options on Twitter. Attempting to do so results in 'paralysis through analysis', at least for me.

The individual programs on a TV channel are received selectively. No one records an entire network line-up in wholesale fashion. I can record NASCAR on ESPN for an hour without having to also record all the other sports I don't care about. With Twitter, following a poster means getting every little thought that passes through his keyboard. That means to get those posts that are within the poster's area of expertise, the ones you're following him for, you also have to get the ones about his family, friends, travel problems, political opinions, etc. It's like having to fast forward through eight hours of baseball coverage to get to the one hour of drag racing.

I don't have anything worth posting on Twitter, and I don't have a problem with that. But in at least five attempts, I haven't figured out how to get any value from it as an information source. I've Googled for help any number of times but all I get are variations on how to use it as a poster to build a brand. There aren't any "Twitter 101 for Lurkers" web sites.

In short, it confuses me.

The way I use it is that many info sites, groups and people of interest have twitter handles - I just follow the ones I am interested in. It is as simple as that. You like an Author - you find his twitter handle and follow him.

but I quickly found I don't care what that author has to say outside of his published work, or what my favorite race car driver says when he's not at the track. One of my gripes with Twitter is that it treats all of a poster's comments as if they had equal value. I'm not willing to put up with the multitude of personal observations and family activities to get the minimal information on the publication date of the next book, or why the car spun out late in the race. Just me, I guess, since millions seem to hang on many posters' every word.

Many of the people I pay attention to I have not "followed," that is subscribed, such that their posts show up in a stream on my twitter home page.

Instead I just visit their twitter page, scroll down to the last post I recall seeing, then scroll up, looking only at the posts that have the kind of info I'm after.

Much better than having the flood in my stream replete with lunch menus and children's accomplishments. I can hit a person's tweets and middle click the links they've dug up that I 'follow' them for.

I "follow" several dozen people, but my twitter "following" list has only 3. Most I "follow" by hitting the "twitter" folder in my firefox bookmarks. Much swifter, less junk, easier to filter out the latter.

Try 3. And you had to get up and walk across the room to change 'em! Being the youngest in my family meant that I WAS the "remote control" when we gathered to watch the prime time fare.

ABC, NBC, CBS, and usually a public television station. If lived in a really big city, you;s also get a local independent station, a la WGN in Chicago or WTBS in Atlanta. Go back far enough in time and the deceased Dumont network was still on the air, but that definitely precedes my awareness.

Sometimes I had to hold the antenna -just right- in the fourth quarter.

I just dropped Facebook yesterday. I had planned to do it for months but didn't get around to it because I log on so infrequently. My daughter and her husband dropped it months ago. I think it's downright dangerous. Look around and see how many people have lost job opportunites or even lost their jobs because of Facebook. It's atrocious.