Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away….

I am a shy and private person.

Whenever someone does the “go around the room and introduce yourself” thing, I cringe. When my turn comes up, I give the minimum amount of information I can get away with: basically name, rank, and serial number.

(As a side note, there’s a story in Chuck Hustmyre’s book, Killer with a Badge, that I find darkly amusing. Basically, the Fine New Guy brought in to head up the New Orleans PD is going around the room doing the “introduce yourself and tell us a little about you” thing, he gets to our hero, and our hero stands up and says “Hello. My name is Eddie Rantz, and I’m an alcoholic… <long pause> I’m sorry. I must be at the wrong meeting.”)

Tycho’s promotion of Google-, “the social network for narcissists”, has a certain emotional resonance for me. (Though I don’t consider myself to be a narcissist; just, as I said earlier, almost pathologically retiring.)

My resistance was never about privacy. I don’t trust Facebook, Google, or any other large corporation (as I’ve said before, anyone who trusts a large corporation, outside of the bounds of a legally enforceable fiduciary duty, should have their sanity checked), but I believe I’m smart enough to manage the privacy issues.

There was a strong element of drama avoidance going on. I didn’t (and don’t) want to water people’s Farmville crops or get caught up in all the other various interpersonal dramas that seemed to play themselves out on Facebook. Not having a Facebook account gives me what the Nixon administration called “plausible deniability”.

So  “Why did ‘mr. anti-social networking’ decide g+ was worthwhile?” to quote an email I received this morning?

Two reasons:

  1. It isn’t Facebook.
  2. A very close, very dear friend asked me to join. When I say “very close, very dear”, I mean if they came to me and said “I’m storming the gates of hell. Want to ride shotgun?” I wouldn’t even stop to pack a sack lunch.

So, yeah, I’m on Google+ now. I’ll probably add a link to the contact information. I’m following Lawrence’s policy; I only add people to my “Friends” circle if they can pick me out of a police lineup. However, the nice thing about Google+ is that I can have another circle for people who don’t meet that criterion. Indeed, I can have many circles; one for fellow bloggers, another for people I like but who would fail the police lineup test, another for family, and even another for the mothers of my illegitimate children. (Just kidding, Mom. I don’t have any. That I know about.)

The fun never stops here at WCD. Watch this space for more random G+ thoughts as they come to me.

(And thank you, again, to my friend, who shall remain anonymous to protect his/her privacy.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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