{"id":141,"date":"2007-07-26T16:20:53","date_gmt":"2007-07-26T16:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntucat.wordpress.com\/2007\/07\/26\/social-peer-pressuring\/"},"modified":"2007-07-26T16:20:53","modified_gmt":"2007-07-26T16:20:53","slug":"social-peer-pressuring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/social-peer-pressuring\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Peer Pressuring"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I remember when a whole bunch of my friends signed up for Xanga. They were blogging like crazy, leaving comments on each others&#8217; Xanga blogs and having a jolly old time. Well, they all encouraged me to <i>read<\/i> their Xanga blogs, but I couldn&#8217;t comment on their blogs without a Xanga account. So I created a Xanga account just to leave comments. <\/p>\n<p> Then came the barrage of emails requesting I join Friendster. I held out for a long time. I held out for a very long time, but I kept getting the emails over and over again. The only way to stop the emails from coming? Join Friendster. So I joined. I even gave it a chance (<i>Maybe this social networking thing isn&#8217;t so bad&#8230;<\/i>). It was lame. Friendster&#8217;s server was slow or down all the time. And I just didn&#8217;t see what the point of the site was. Sure, you connect with some old friends you don&#8217;t talk to any more. Then what happens? Well, you&#8217;re connected, but you still don&#8217;t talk to each other. <\/p>\n<p> The most recent fad among my friends is Facebook. They rave about Facebook. Well, for a while my wife held out. Then she spent a weekend away with some of our friends and came back a Facebook convert. That made me even more resistant. It&#8217;s like a cult! Now, my wife is &#8220;social networking&#8221; on Facebook with <i>my<\/i> friends because I&#8217;m not on Facebook. To be honest, I recognize that my wife is having more fun on Facebook than either of us ever had on Friendster (is it possible to have less fun than on Friendster?), but I just don&#8217;t like the pressure. <i>Join us. Join us!<\/i> That&#8217;s what I hear when someone says <i>When are you going to sign up for Facebook?<\/i> <\/p>\n<p> Maybe some day I will join the cult, but it just feels so creepy to me, like some weird middle school clique, a pyramid scheme, or lemmings jumping off a cliff. Well, at least the lemmings seem happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I remember when a whole bunch of my friends signed up for Xanga. They were blogging like crazy, leaving comments on each others&#8217; Xanga blogs and having a jolly old time. Well, they all encouraged me to read their Xanga blogs, but I couldn&#8217;t comment on their blogs without a Xanga account. So I created&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/social-peer-pressuring\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Social Peer Pressuring<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}