Thursday, July 02, 2009

What is a Friend?

What I'm reading: Sworn to Silence, by Linda Castillo

First, my news. Yesterday, my Five Star release, WHEN DANGER CALLS was a featured read at Barbara Vey's Publisher's Weekly blog.

I'm still working on my short story, with a goal of a complete first draft by Monday. I'm not as far along as I'd hoped, but endings scare the heck out of me. I have too much fun with the writing, and can never seem to wrap things up effectively the first time around. Or the second. As I was told when I started writing, I have a beginning, a middle, and more middle.


Okay, and I watched a little too much Wimbledon. But I've thrown in the next plot twist, and have to figure out how to have "the end" hit at the right word count.

But none of this is related to the topic of today's post, unless you compare watching tennis to another time suck, Social Networking, which is the topic of today's post.

Keep Reading...

Back in May, I blogged about Looking at the New Old Days, and included some comic strips about Social Networking Sites.

The influence of these phenomena seem to be growing exponentially. And will Dictionary.com have to revise it's definition of "friend" which has 5 definitions as a noun, and one as a verb, which it says is rare usage, and really means befriend?

Do I play? A little. I have sites at a lot of the networks. One I haven't yet succumbed to is Twitter (and there's now a whole new definition of "tweet", which has yet to hit the dictionary).

I check in to my Facebook page a few times a day. I notice a few people have dozens and dozens of updates that are fed through their Twitter accounts. Trust me, I'm not THAT interested. And even more importantly, I'M not that interesting. I think Brian Crane says it very well in his Pickles comic strip


Nor am I that interesting. Friends, Followers, whatever. I have to agree with Wiley Miller in the June 30th Non Sequitur comic strip.



When we're lucky enough to sell our house, I'm pretty sure none of those hundreds of friends I have on my social network pages are going to be helping us move.

Yes, I know there's not a lot of "meat" in today's post. I was going to talk about the differences between suspense and thrillers, but I'm saving that for another time. Please come back tomorrow for the conclusion of Detective Hussey's Exhumation chapter.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I may mildly disagree, IMHO there is a lot of meat here. I have been watching this social phenomena with my mental mouth open in shock at how so many people are flocking to rid themselves of the burden of privacy.
Not just the actual messages, but if you read the fine print on any Google product you will find that they claim the copyright on anything, yes ANYTHING, you send through them. This includes emails, photos, anything.
Yahoo makes a fuss over privacy when you sign up for one of their groups, but when the fine print is translated they admit they both gather and sell personal information. Of course they say it's for the user's benefit, but I don't think they send their users checks.
The dissenting view,
Elena

Terry Odell said...

Elena -- I totally agree with your comment about the social networking phenomena.
I think you've brought up a lot of important points -- which would have been the "meat" of the blog had I done anything more with my post but scratch the surface with a few cartoons.

We could blog endlessly about the social networking trends, I'm sure.

Mary Ricksen said...

Live and learn.