Opening the Kimono

Dear readers, I can't fathom what sort of photo could adequately illustrate my mortification when I realized, after joining Facebook, that I'd ranted, ever so gently, last month, against doing just that.

Here's the pertinent section in case you don't feel like reading the whole thing:

"I don’t want to be found by my third-grade classmates. I don’t want to put myself on display. I don’t want to be lulled into exhibitionism by the atmosphere of unabashed sharing and then regret it later. Yes, I know I can set the privacy levels, but I just don’t want to crack that door. It’s too tempting."

So once again, after more or less declaring "never," I've gone and done it. Cracked the door. Opened the kimono ever so slightly. Uploaded photos. Friended pretty much everyone I could think of, and accepted 95% of the friend requests that came my way.

Still, it's a great place to put omote vs. ura to work, and I'm getting lots and lots of practice in the ancient arts of temptation avoidance and self-restraint. Because as nice as I may seem to be most of the time, I have a serious snarky streak, and hard experience has taught me that it's best to keep it under wraps.

At any rate, it's done, and I don't feel I caved completely, because I joined partially for work -- to study the beast and understand it. Here's a short list of what I've learned so far:

- Posts get sentimental and/or silly late at night.

- People LOVE quizzes.

- People also love to dispute the results of quizzes.

- Quizzes can be gamed.

- It's a great place to seek advice and opinions on things like the best way to quit coffee (thanks again, everyone -- today is Day 3, and I'm not missing it).

- Some people are so friendly they'll accept your friend request even if they don't know you. Okay, so the guy could also have been clueless, or looking to reach a certain friend count, but still. I definitely had the wrong guy, and it was almost certainly clear to him that he didn't know me, and he accepted my friend request anyway.

- It can be simultaneously comforting and alienating.

- It's a very serendipitous environment. I would call it Zen, but I don't know enough about Zen to know if that's accurate. Maybe my next status update should be a social media koan: Is Facebook Zen?


And on that note, I leave you with a random photograph.