A friend asked me to “like” his wife’s jewelry store on Facebook because I have a few hundred followers there and he wanted some publicity for her. I agreed, although I very rarely accede to such requests, because I don’t care about my Facebook page. I only started it for one reason — to check on what my daughter’s doing online. Yes, I have my Twitter feed sent to my Facebook page, but I have never posted anything directly to Facebook, and I’m not interested in receiving invitations to play games, go to meetings, or join groups.
Twitter is the only social media I use other than this blog, and I try to tweet and post something every day. But if you send me a request to connect with you on LinkedIn, I’ll ignore it because I closed my account on that site when I realized I never checked it (despite having a couple of hundred connections, which I also never looked at). You also won’t find me on FourSquare, Google+, Tumblr, Meetup, MySpace, or Friendster.
It’s not that I’m internet-averse. I’ve been online for over 25 years, back to the early days of CompuServe, through AOL, right up until I started my own site with my own coding in the mid-1990s. But I don’t need more phony friends or people who want to associate with me just to increase their own numbers. I also won’t retweet your message because it’s your birthday or you have a sick family member or you want to win a new car. That’s just web clutter, which I want no part of.
While I’ll never reach Andrew Sullivan or Mark Evanier levels of output, I’m making an effort to do more writing/venting for this site. If you want to read what I have to say, or get updates on when I’ll be doing a radio show, or listen to the thousands of podcasts I’ve posted, or follow me on Twitter, I appreciate it very much. If you want to get in touch with me, my e-mail address is on the right side of every page of this blog.
But that’s about as social as I’m ever going to get.