Last week I had dinner with some of the people they had studied with me twenty-five years ago. Everything came out of a photo I found in a drawer and it occurred to me to hang on to my Facebook page for friends can see howI looked liked when I was fifteen. Something funny and entertaining that many people often do, that in a spontaneous way enabled us to contact some of those who were in that picture. As often happens in these cases, the next step was to organize a dinner to remember old times.
After catching up to date on what had happened to us since we have studies (twenty-five years worth while some time) the subject which inevitably came to the discussion was Facebook, the tool through which we had been able to reunite. Given that we are all in ours early forties, so far from being considered digital natives, one of the questions that emerged was clear: “What you use Facebook for?”
The responses were diverse and had a lot to do with the different ways in which we had arrived at Facebook. The vast majority were invited by someone younger, and after a first stage searching for the people with whom we relate at the moment, we began our search of the past with a surprising result for some attending the dinner.
I know people who say, without any complex, that they use Facebook for “dating“, while others use it to report on what they do and some just want to share information and hobbies with friends.
I personally use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and obviously the Blog. The more useful Facebook it is to me is both to keep contact with people from my recent past as to reconnect with those with whom I shared my youth times. In principle, I only accept as Facebook friends those whom I have enough confidence to go out to dinner one night and have drinks together. Twitter in turn allows me to contact people who have concerns similar to mine, people who in most cases I do not know personally. With Twitter, I am a follower of those who either by their comments or information they share, help me stay up to date on topics of my interest. The Blog as the title says, is the place where I share my views with those who want to do it with me, while LinkedIn is my network of professional contacts, people with whom I have had, at some time, a professional relationship or with which could have it in a future.
Go ahead my highest respect and understanding to the use each one can give to the 2.0 tools, if not illegal or malicious, but I think at some point we need to sit down and reflect on why we use them and especially for what we use them since when we do it, consciously or unconsciously, we are contributing to create our own digital identity.
As in real life one does not behave the same way at work, with friends or family, in the virtual world we can also be different. The places where we are and the amount of contacts, friends and/or followers that we have, can say a lot of us but to do so in one way or another does not depend on the number itself but on the use we make of each tool.
In my case, not all my friends who are on Facebook are LinkedIn contacts; with very few being followers of each other on Twitter. This is because for me, Facebook is the tool that connects me with the recent and distant past, Blog and Twitter are the tools part of my current active present and LinkedIn is the one where I can find my future.
And in your case, what 2.0 tools you use and for what?
ksibe
[...] response to my friend was “if you want to be on the network and begin building your digital identity, just do it, but decide where you want to volunteer to be, why you want to be and what you want to [...]