Why I don’t do ‘social networking’ and why I have no ‘friends´

Of course I have friends. I just don’t have ‘friends’. Facebook and MySpace tell me:

“You have no friends.”

That´s a lie. How would they know anyhow? They have no insight into my private life and why should they? Besides, I don´t want my private foibles to be exploited by the pedlars of consumerist propaganda (‘advertising´). I’m glad I have ‘no friends’ if the financial point of ‘friends’ in online ‘social networking’ is for me and those ‘friends’ to provide the pedlars of insidious consumerist propaganda with a neatly defined target group.

No service is ever free: you always have to pay some way or other. Personally I prefer to pay up front for the service I need (like this website) rather than be fooled into thinking I can get something for nothing. I often ask myself why, when the propagandists want me to part with my money for the benefit of the company they're working for, I'm told it’s an ’offer’, that I will ‘save’, that I’ll get something (that I most probably neither want nor need) ‘for free’, that prices have been ‘slashed’, that it’s an opportunity not to miss, etc.? Do they think I’m an idiot? The point here is that I don’t want anyone who uses this site, be they friend or foe, to be exposed, directly or indirectly, to the boring and infantile machinations of ‘advertising’. That’s one reason why I don’t engage in ‘social networking’ on line. I’m proud to protect my friends, as well as myself, from the ravenous wolves of corporate marketing departments, even if I have to pay for that privilege.

Public and private spheres

I just Googled <+facebook +"I had for breakfast">: about 1,200,000 hits. The equivalent results for MySpace were 600,000. Here are some more results:

A lot of personal details and opinion, here, most of them belonging clearly to the private, sometimes even intimate, sphere. And yet all this private personalia is strewn all over the internet, just like all those concealed yet emphasised private parts plastered on billboards all over the cityscape (Dolce & Gabbana’s prominently placed erotic fantasies of supposedly desirable young adults in various states of undress are obvious examples). Plastering private parts of people’s lives all over the public sphere is something advertisers seem bent on doing. I don’t see why we should have to be exposed to it, even less why we ourselves would want to put the private parts of our own lives on public display.

Like most people, I don’t want to know what someone I´ve never heard of had for breakfast, or what they think of Bob. I don’t need to know if they’re worried about their boyfriend flirting on Facebook, or whether they like or hate Céline Dion (unless if I’m an anthropologist studying Dion fandom), any more than I want to see strange young men posing homo-erotically in underpants as I enter the train station. The internet is, like it or not, a public space allowing comparatively democratic access to anyone wanting to contribute to or take part in the global public forum it provides.

That’s why, on my personal page, I’ve ‘censored out’ all the private parts of my life that I don’t think belong in the public sphere. In the same way that I do not intend to walk downtown naked, I think that my phone numbers, email address, postal address, date of birth, culinary preferences, personal likes and dislikes, financial and marital status, plus details about my health and domestic life, etc. are, with certain obvious exceptions, nobody’s business except mine. None of this need be on public display. I don’t hide my political opinion (see Rants) because politics is in my view a clearly public issue, even if the votes I cast in an election stay mainly ‘between me and the ballot box’.