Male, 45, nope. I did have a LiveJournal account I posted on for a very little while, but I haven’t glanced at it in years. Not sure I can even remember my password for it, assuming it hasn’t been deleted for lack of use.
Every once in awhile I consider joining, usually because someone prods me to. It’d be mildly handy for satisfying curiosity about distant family, maybe. But at the end of the day I just can’t be arsed.
No Facebook, no Twitter. I can’t imagine why I’d want a Facebook page. I really don’t want to put my life out there for everyone to see and comment on. My friends and family know how to reach me when they want to communicate.
As to Twitter, a 140 character limit is hardly conducive to communicating deep thoughts.
53, male.
Male 61.
I guess I’m theoretically on FB, since I set up an account once and actually looked at something, but I never set up the page and the last time I tried to log into it it said there was an issue, which was a good enough reason for me to forget the whole thing.
Ditto Twitter. I don’t think I made it through the login process, or did and forgot my password. So if I am on I’m just as good as not being on.
LinkedIn yes. While I never ask to connect with anyone, I accept all reasonable requests for connections, and have quite a few. I even set up a page for my conference with a discussion board. But I’m hardly an expert user. If I ever needed a job before I retire (which is extremely unlikely) I guess I’d have connections, but I have far more using more standard techniques.
I’ve got too many interruptions already - I don’t need more.
Male, 62.
Although I’ve had a FB account for several years, the novelty wore off after the first few weeks. For the past three years I check in for a few minutes every 6-8 weeks at most.
No Facebook
No Twitter
No LiveJournal
No Pinterest
Male, 49.
You guys are more than enough for me…thankyouverymuch.
People have given me a hard time about it, as if it is a personal affront to them that I don’t have a Facebook page. Which only serves to validate my decision. I don’t relish the idea of hearing people whining about how I haven’t friended them or how I don’t update my page enough. And I don’t trust my ego to keep the “like” thing from stroking my ego too much.
A Facebook page broadcasts to the world “This is who I am”. I don’t want that.
In a way it is news - they (celebrity/subject of news story) are communicating with quantities of people. If Rocker McGuitar-Smasher shouts “CATS ARE BETTER THAN DOGS!” in between sets at his well-attended concert, that can be just as newsworthy as him tweeting it to his 30,000 followers (especially if it’s in the context of an ongoing hypothetical public debate over whether Cats or Dogs are better).
Personally (Male in his 30s) people are frequently shocked when I tell them I’m not on Facebook. The reasons are varied, but they largely boil down to “Anyone I want to connect with I talk to in real life or by e-mail”, “I don’t like the drama, glurge, and ‘worlds colliding’ that goes with it”, and “I simply don’t trust Facebook or their ‘privacy’ and probably never will.”
/me raises hand.
It offers me nothing. the one or two people I went to school with who I care to see again, I know where they are and I see them every so often. As for the rest of those shitheads, I would sooner set them on fire than be in the same room with them ever again. “Catch up with old friends!” Fuck you. I don’t have any.
No FB, no Twits.
50
I have a FB account only because it was set up for me. I only have a tiny handful of ‘friends’, a couple of distant relatives who send me pictures from their charmed exciting lives, and a couple of school friends. Mostly I get glurge by the bucketful and spend a lot of time deleting trite crap, but I haven’t bothered to ‘unfriend’ them. I use FB to send myself youtube videos I like and things that I am interested in, god knows I get little of that from my ‘friends’. Lot of something about nothing, FB is, but I suppose I’m out of the demographic. I know naught of twitter and am still not sure exactly what it is or why anyone would want it, but again I’m out of the loop. I do like looking at my ‘food porn’, cheezburger cats, and horoscope, easier to look at FB than bother to look it up myself!
Male, mid-50s. I am not on Facebook and have no interest in joining. This Board takes up enough of my time as it is.
My wife, however, also in her 50s, is on Facebook. And something called LINE, which I’m starting to hear more about but not sure yet what it is.
Mid-fifties female American, had a Facebook account for a couple of months and it was horribly invasive, so I shut it down. I always forget I stopped hanging around with those people for a reason :D.
I signed up for a Twitter account under a pseudonym just to see why I should, never found an answer, and abandoned ship.
As for Twitter, here’s an example of how bizarre it’s become. There’s some Thai guy here who is considered the king of Thai tweets. He tweets everything. EVERYTHING. I know this only because he was interviewed by a local English-language newspaper. The reporter wrote that the guy would tweet “They’re asking me such-and-such” with each question. And he would tweet “I’m telling them such-and-such” with each answer. Apparently he never takes his fingers off the controls and tweets nonstop. This is really sad.
..so the old me is twice the new me?
And you’re forgetting that ‘every couple of months’ is like billions of years in Facetwitt.
I used to studiously avoid Facebook, but I had to get on it because my 20th High School reunion was being organized ONLY on Facebook, and if you weren’t on and in the special private group, you simply did not get any updates.
After a while, I got addicted a little. And I figured out it was easy to set your stuff as private as you want, to block the ads and tracking you don’t want, and really…it does an awful lot for free. Now I have an active FB page and run a transgender activism newsgroup with more than 100 members.
And I have been pleasantly surprised by all the folks I knew in Junior High and High School, some I’d forgotten even existed, who have got in touch with me to talk about old times. Just yesterday a girl I used to like in my Junior year looked me up, and we chatted for a while, and it was cool.
I know some don’t like FB, and it can be irritating when one of your friends posts 15 times a day about “OBAMACARE IS RAPING OUR VETERANS!” or “OMFG AMBER ALERT A CHILD IN OUTER MONGOLIA IS MISSING, HAVE YOU SEEN HIM?” But it has been a net benefit to my life.
Now Twitter, I don’t get. I tried it and it was absolutely godawful boring.
I tried to create one for my business, but every time I try to use it to post something on some other business’s wall, it appears for me and no one else. I think they are trying to force me to create a personal page, which I resolutely refuse to do.
I trust Mark Zuckerberg about as far as I can throw him.
That is the most annoying thing about Facebook. It’s a return to the “bad old days” of AOL and Compuserve.
I do use Twitter because it allows some level of anonymity. I post my videos to it, occasionally reply to tweets by the small handful of businesses and friends I follow, and that’s it.
That reminds me of a very funny bit in Doonesbury years ago when Twitter was still pretty new. Roland Burton Hedley, the arrogant, conceited reporter just got an account and is tweeting every little thought. In one panel, he types:
“My shorts are bunching. Thoughts?”
I joined Facebook once under my professional name, which is different from my actual name, to read about a professional group that was only on Facebook. I was instantly inundated with “Friend” requests. It was horrible. I’ve never gone back.
Male, 41, never been on Facebook.
And it really annoys me how the comment pages on cricinfo load more slowly because half of the people who are posting on an article about cricket apparently think that I’m interested in logging on to their Facebook page and hearing about their last bowel movement.
It’s still better than Twitter, though.
IIRC, there was some talk a couple of years back about sending something like the Arecibo Message out into space, consisting of twitter posts.
If we ever send out twitter messages to aliens then we, as a species, deserve to die, ID4 style.
Go ahead, human punks. Make my day.
I’d actually like to hear about your last bowel movement. Hell, when was the last bowel movement thread on here?
I’m lately finding Twitter much more annoying of a web presence than Facebook. I really dislike people on Podcasts always needing to plug their Twitter handle. I think Twitter is an ok idea, but any usefulness is diluted by the overwhelming quantity of drivel found there.
I’m at family’s now, and haven’t seen the kids on Facebook at all. A year or two ago, they would have been on it all evening. That seems promising.