I guess I've been thinking a lot about social media and social network sites, and balancing my growing distaste for the behaviors surrounding them, their potential misuse/abuse, and their fleeting nature (coupled with my desire to only invest my finite time and energy in things that last, relatively), with the sites' utopic possibilities, and more practically, their usefulness for relationship-maintenance as well as self-promotion (which I'm also coming to terms with, separately).

So this paragraph from Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?, yet another article about Facebook in this week's New York Magazine, struck a chord:

Maybe it’s claustrophobic to know this much about other people. Maybe we like the way the way we’ve been able to live over the past 50 years, the freedom to move where we want, date who we like, and insert ourselves into any number of social cliques, before we cast aside those who bore us and never look back. Independence is a gift, even if it’s lonely sometimes, and solving childhood mysteries may make people happier, but it doesn’t necessarily turn them into the people they dream of being. So we keep perpetuating the cycle of birthing and abandoning new online communities, drawing close and then pulling away, on a perpetual search for the perfect balance of unity and autonomy on the web.

I don't want to leave without pronouncing some sort of less-than-satisfied judgment on the article, or without offering my own analysis, because that would imply endorsement of the piece and create an appearance that I didn't spend much time in critical thought about the writing or its subject. But I don't want to appear dismissive, like I was obligated to take a swipe at the article from some absurd need to posture about my own obviously expert knowledge about These Things.

So I'll leave it at the meta-comment!

(via Debra)