Nearly a billion served

Are you stunned when you learn that someone doesn’t have a Facebook account? How could these people choose not to be connected with about a billion others who use the service? After all, that’s a billion potential friends.

But what are they really missing? Do they need to know, for instance, that you’ve just made a grilled cheese sandwich ?

Or that you’re settling in to watch "Dancing With the Stars"? The answer is “no” and “no.”

 

How about other social media? Is your blog so brilliant that their refusal to read it is tantamount to a crime against humanity? Do they really need to log on to Foursquare to learn your exact location at any given moment. Um, nope.

And Twitter? Do your pithy 140-character comments about how lousy the Red Sox are this season provide meaning, enlightenment, or any sort of tangible benefit? Again, you know the answer.

 

Some call these social-media teetotalers Luddites, but I just respect them as savvy consumers. They’ve surveyed the landscape and determined which products and services will add value to their lives, and which they can safely disregard as mere clutter.

 

These people are typically private by nature, and see no reason to share personal details with a worldwide audience. They also clearly view the narcissim inherent in social media as just this side of grotesque — a desperate, unhealthy desire to be noticed.

 

I tend to agree, but I can also step back and see why social media appeals to people’s craving for attention. My perspective on this is somewhat unique. Over the course of my journalism career I wrote hundreds of newspaper columns about my kids, my relationships with neighbors, my views on all sorts of subjects — anything that struck my fancy on a given day (I often went for laughs, with mixed results).

But in the old media, I and other print journalists were the only game in town. We were fortunate to have a vehicle to spew our thoughts. The rest of the population who wanted to tell a story had few outlets to do so — maybe you wrote a long-year-end holiday letter to friends and family, or, if you were talented and lucky, perhaps you got an essay published in one of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books.

It occurred to me recently that the voracious participation in sites like Facebook and YouTube, as well as the blogosphere, is simply an unleashing of all that pent-up need to share personal testimony with a wider audience. True, some go about it with more eloquence than others, but ultimately I believe everyone’s primary motivation is best summed up in the same three-word statement defining a typical Foursquare user.

I am here.