Quitting Facebook...

     FYI - to all you my friends (real friends!!!)  -  I have quit facebook, and my account is being deleted.  I am just too influenced by other's posts and I also feel that there is a HUGE privacy issue I'd rather not be a part of.  We can still be friends though, right! ;-) 

     I still have e-mail.  I suppose some of you might think me a hermit, after all, isn't Facebook the modern equivalent to television?  Well, call me crazy Dave, but don't call me late for dinner!  I have spent my whole career in computers and there really is such a vacuum in the world of cyberspace.  Real relationships with real people in the flesh is so much more....real.  But they also take work, and perhaps that is the issue at hand.  Facebook is a chore.  It's wonderful to have some contact with so many, but how many CLOSE friends can someone have?  I read somewhere (long before FB) that men usually have only 4-5 close friends at any one time in their lives.  If that is true, and we seek to have many times more "friends" on FB, how does that devalue those friendships?

     We have all felt the pain of someone misunderstanding your opinions, posts, etc.  I sometimes think, that in an effort to make FB seem all the more real, we put things out there that perhaps ought not to be.  Think about what you would say verbally, when people are present.  Sure we don't want to be fakes - but neither do we want to be so emotionally exposed that people don't really know us.  Think about how much easier it is to explain something to someone face to face - where you can hear voice inflection and see facial cues.  And how many of us have sent an e-mail off only to find out how easily it was misunderstood... or worse yet, typing it out in a fit of passion, but never intending it to be seen.... but it does!  Oops!  We all make mistakes and the fatal flaw of the convenience of Facebook, e-mail, and the cyber-world, is that we do so much with such ease we frequently overlook the appropriateness of our words.  Sure, I don't want to be politically correct just because that’s the elitist way, but what is wrong with a little discretion? 

     I will be the first to tell you that I have been occasionally offensive in my posts.  I have tried NOT to be, but the nature of the medium, is what it is.  So my plan is to periodically post a blog entry.  This will be a little window into what I am thinking, without having to consider every newsy item that scrolls by the news feed.  The world moved by just fine before FB, and I think it will be just fine afterwards. 

     So I haven't gone anywhere, just pulling the plug on Facebook. 

     As for the MANY photos I have uploaded, I have even more than those on the computer, and will plan I categorizing them and putting them on a DVD/CD for all family members who want it.  Thanks,

Dave