The masses need to know

• You: So Andy, can I call you Andy?
• Me: No.
• You: So Andrew, the world needs to know: why so long to join Facebook?
• Me: Well, it's complicated. For a start, Facebook exploded into my social scene, splattering pretty much everyone I knew at the time over a period of two weeks. It amounted to "durrr what's an Inter-Net?" one week and "OMG like you totally gotta get on Facebook! Everybody's there!" the next. That sort of fad irritates me, and that's what started my initial rejection of the network. It's taken about two years for the momentum of that to wear off.
• You: But surely, someone as smart and handsome as yourself isn't swayed by petty fads! There has to be more to it.
• Me: Obviously. For one, there's something to be said about giving something a proper test drive before dumping vitriol and hate onto it. For another, a couple of friends of mine just moved away, and they're both Facebook superstars, so the easiest way for me to keep in touch is to enter the hive.
• You: Anything else?
• Me: I'm in an upswing as far as blogging and putting things up on the internet. I've been twittering for a while now, and there's already an app to pipe my updates there directly into Facebook; soon there will be one for my Tumblr page. I've recontextualized the whole "we are the Facebook zombie mob: JOIN US JOIN US" argument into "Hey, this is just another way I can annoy people". I'm also turning into somewhat of an attention whore as far as making music goes, and there are way more people on Facebook that will hear what I make and tell me what they think.
• You: So what's your impression of Facebook so far?
• Me: It's neat. I like that all my friends are on it, and the photo sharing aspect is nice, even if I have to de-tag myself over and over and over and over again. I like the way Facebook is layed out, although it's only good after the AdBlock filters are finished with it. Mostly, I just like that I can funnel many of the things that I do elsewhere on the internet into Facebook with relative ease, and since that's where all my friends are, it means that people wind up seeing it, and isn't that the point?
• You: Anything you don't like?
• Me: The semantics.
• You: What do you mean?
• Me: Every relationship in Facebook is a friendship. That doesn't really sit well with me, since I consider friendship to be more than "hey, I used to go to elementary school with you, and even though we have nothing in common, haven't spoken in twenty years and don't even live in the same country, we're certainly friends". I much prefer the Twitter style of labelling in which you follow rather than friend (yes, friend is a verb now). I find follow much more palatable because if we're friends on Facebook, that doesn't mean we share a relationship that is friendship. It means that your updates will show up in my news feed and you can see my profile and I am following up on what you do in the network. Follow doesn't presume a relationship that isn't there.
• You: So we're not friends?
• Me: That works for Twitter because everything is basically public, whereas Facebook is a mostly private network (well, not at all, but you know what I mean). You typically can't see anything about someone else unless you have mutual consent to share profiles, and I suppose needing this mutual okay-ness is where the friend verb comes from in the first place. I've been fiddling with the privacy settings in Facebook to get a best of both worlds situation, where there's a private short list of people who are my friends (y'know, we hang out in real life) and these folks get to write on my wall and such, while there's another, larger set of friends that get to see my profile and follow my updates, but that's about it. It's all about being able to play by my rules.
• You: That's stupid. You're stupid.
• Me: No, you're stupid. This interview is over.