Hi. My name is Kathleen, and I use facebook too much.

(“hi Kathleen welcome to fba … facebookaholics anonymous” etc – you know what to do)

Let me get something straight. I don’t play the games, at all, because I get sick of them after two minutes. I know people who do, though (hi Belinda) so each to their own. I don’t use any of the applications at all, and I probably have about 60 friends, max. Most of those are relatives (remember: Irish) and people I went to highschool with and therefore haven’t talked to in three years. I just always have it in the background, waiting for someone to say or do something interesting so I can pounce on it and liven up my night. Which is usually spent alone with a glass of wine and…

Right, anyway, ergo, facebook = detriment. A time detriment. To everyone. You know it’s true. But go ahead, argue with me. I know some of you will.

But… not all of the new technological tools are such a detriment to my productivity (and my social life :(  )

Twitter for example. I don’t post twitters (or tweets, whatever the hell), because I can’t think of anything more egomaniacal. Whenever my one lone friend that I know in real life that I follow posts a tweet I want to introduce his head to a cricket bat. Repeatedly. But I follow many interesting people who post many interesting things. I follow celebrities (…well, David Hewlett…), as well as a variety of people, from Neil Degrasse Tyson to Chas Licciardello. These people are fantastic to follow – they’re interesting and they introduce me to news articles and ideas that I normally wouldn’t find.

Along with Twitter, one of the most useful technological tools I use is RSS feeds. This is one of the most useful tools the internet has spawned. I can check these RSS feeds each morning and catch up on news that interests me. I don’t have to go to a site to view their new content, I can just check my RSS feeds and it will show me the updated content.  

And as for google? Google is both good and bad.  I like to think that most of the stuff I know, I well, know.  It's in my head.  I don't know where I get some of it, and some it is so obscure and stupid that I wonder what isn't being stored in my head due to that taking up space.  But at least I know it.  I see a lot of people who only know what the internet tells them.  Off the internet, they are stupid or have an oddly distorted view of the world or a topic, because they only remember part of a opinion that they supposedly have.  I have a lot of odd opinions, but at least they're mine and I own up to that.

So some technological tools are useful. Some are not. Some are creepy and stalkerish. A lot of them are getting too close to a nineteen eighty four type world for me to be comfortable. These technological tools have changed us, and they’ve changed the world in which we live. So we can’t say that they are bad, as such, because in today’s world we couldn’t live without them.

Catch 22, right?

MySpace annoys me, sorry, I’m not going to discuss it.