simonlife

My profile on Facebook is pretty bare. I intentionally leave out a lot of details about myself so that people will find me irresistibly mysterious and intriguing. Just kidding. In truth, I thought that having a website would eliminate the need for a comprehensive, all-disclosing Facebook profile; it just didn’t seem to make sense to say the same things twice in two different places.

As it turns out though, this blog can’t actually tell you everything that a completed Facebook profile might be able to. It probably takes longer to read too. Thus, since people are lazy and not always willing to click the link on my profile that would take them here, the bareness of my profile just makes me look like a social rebel with an inflated ego.

Oh, well. The purpose of this post is to explain why my Facebook profile was recently downsized even further, not to enumerate the reasons why I should be conformist.

Begone!

I removed all my Notes, which were really just my blog posts, imported by Facebook via RSS. Facebook allows users to leave comments on the notes they read, but as my blog has the same feature, I ended up having two disparate sets of comments for each entry: one stored by my blog and another stored by Facebook. That seemed to me to be a design flaw. It would be nice if only one set of comments was maintained between the two services, but as I can’t really expect Facebook to interface with my blogging software (Wordpress), this is just me being stubbornly pedantic in a technical sort of way.

I can disable Note comments, you say? I guess that might solve the problem, but I think there’s a bigger issue at hand. Namely, I like to write about serious or even contentious topics from time to time, and I don’t think the social fabric surrounding Facebook puts people in the right state of mind to read that kind of stuff. Facebook users are constantly reading wall posts, browsing through photos, or finding out about the silly things their friends are doing, and casual amusement like that seems to create the wrong affective environment for discourse on religion or morality or whatever I’ve got bumbling around in my head. This is a domain-related problem, you understand. It’s like bringing beer to 10 AM lecture.

I also left all my Groups. I was never really, 100% satisfied with the ones that I was in. There was always something about the name or description that bothered me. Sometimes, it was something objective like a blatant spelling or grammatical error (I’m picky like that), and other times, there was something more profound and subtly awry with the group’s ideology that nagged at my conscience. And as I wasn’t about to join only those groups that perfectly satisfied my tastes, I decided to leave them all—kind of an all or nothing thing.

About Me

My Facebook profile is pretty much worthless now. I’ve got my courses and some of my contact information listed, but there isn’t much else that will tell you anything useful about myself. And that places a premium on the role of this website. Maybe I’ll just maintain a Facebook-esque profile here somewhere on my blog. Yes, perhaps I’ll do that. It is, after all, about that time of year when simonlife gets a makeover. Maybe I’ll do more than just go nuts in Photoshop this time.