I’m not in fact excited by this new thing out there called google+ (google plus). It’s not entirely rational. I use facebook, and in fact, I dislike it. I’m a perfect profile of an early adopter when it comes to this type of thing. Yet I don’t want to. Here’s how I’m thinking about it.
For the last half decade, I have viewed google and how I use it as a rather “professional space.” I rely on it, utterly, being an expat with only remote access to the servers that host my underlying internet domain names and email addresses. It’s also where I keep my writing (such as it is – having once lost an entire novel to a hard drive failure), I now keep my writing in google docs as well as on two different hard drives, most of the time.
Meanwhile, my attitude about “social networks” such as facebook is that there is something, at core, deeply “unprofessional” about them. So in google+ I find my “professional” webspace trying to elbow its way into my “unprofessional” one, and my gut reaction is: “no, these things need to stay separate.”
I don’t ever want to be in a situation where something involving my “social presence” online compromises my ability to access my professional webspace. You hear horror stories about people getting banned from facebook due to some misunderstood post, which involves some controversial statement or even the behavior of some online “friend.” I can’t risk losing access to tools such as gmail and google docs, at this point – they are integrated into my current lifestyle too deeply.
I’m not sure if this is entirely rational. But even as it is, I sometimes dread having some online acquaintance post something embarrassing or inappropriate on my facebook – given it’s a space also accessible to many former bosses and coworkers as well as my current boss (not to mention former and current students!). People will say, “well, but Jared, you post so much personal and deep and intimate stuff on this blog! What’s the difference?” And I will say, only, “that’s a good point.” But I would differentiate only the following: I have absolute curatorial control over my blog. I own it. I own the server it’s on (well, I rent it – but I control it). Facebook, on the other hand, says right in its “end user agreement” that they are the ones with curatorial control of your content, and you hear stories about people who put things on facebook and can’t make them disappear or can’t edit them later. Or about the people who get banned from facebook for some misunderstood post or comment. More than once, I’ve gone back and changed some past post in this blog, after reconsidering the impact of the kind of impression it might make on some reader or another.
Well, that’s all not that relevant. I’m feeling like this is a pretty rambling, incoherent attempt at a rant.
All I’m saying is that I don’t feel at all interested in trying google plus, despite despising facebook and yet being utterly “married” to it, at this point – I value its ability to keep me in touch with people.
Unrelatedly, what I’m listening to right now.
K-os, “Hallelujah.” [UPDATE: the following sentence is no longer true. Youtube embed was used, the German one had rotted anyway.] The embedded video is from some German website, since the youtube version was blocked in Korea (grumble annoyance grumble).
