I love the internet, it’s where I live. Sometimes, though, I feel like I am spread a little thin across the internet and I get this into this spring cleaning mode and I start deleting accounts.
I just closed my last.fm account. Why? Well I was finding myself (sometimes, not always), either listening to, or not listening to, music for the sake of manipulating my stats on last.fm. Last.fm is an awesome site and excellent tool, but it was starting to weigh in on my music-listening decision making. I know this doesn’t happen to everyone, and I am probably in the minority, but I have to say this right now: “Last.fm, you’re great. You’re gonna make someone really happy. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m just not grown up enough to have a relationship with you, because obviously, I still care about what music people think I listen to.”
Last.fm isn’t the only service on my web 2.0 Dear John letter list. I closed my account with feedburner awhile back when it occurred to me that the only reason I used it was to embed my flickr and del.icio.us feeds into my site feed. I kind of felt like people were subscribing to my life and that felt a little weird. Once again, this is all me feeling weird about shit that doesn’t matter. Surely my flickr feed is out there and anyone can subscribe to it. I mean, you can link to my flickr page at the top of the screen! I just didn’t like the idea of it all being piped through one service. I guess I also thought it made the site a little too dependent on outside services. Just me being a weirdo.
It can only be hoped that in the next month I will have the courage to close my myspace account. I really, really hate myspace but goddamn if I am not socially invested in it like a trillion other people I know. I have friends who don’t call or email me because they only use myspace. I can’t even understand why anyone has AOL anymore, it seems like the computer-illiterate populous all has myspace accounts, what could they possibly need AOL for? At one point I had my myspace account totally locked down because I didn’t want to be found by people from school or work– even though this blog is totally public.
Off-subject, who did the awesome sketch of you that you use for your flickr profile-pic? It’s great.
And more on-topic, I’m impressed that you use your full name with/on your blog. I’m not there and don’t know that I ever will be, and probably not so much for security reasons as for reasons of not being happy enough with/proud enough of my life as it is these days to want [former classmates, former employers, potential/future employers, ex-boyfriend, ex-friends, and whoever else] to be able to find me and “subscribe to my life,” as you put it, that way. Anyway, I think it’s great that you’re comfortable doing that.
A guy I used to work with drew it one day while he was aggressively ignoring me asking him for help with something. He stared me in the face, ignored me and drew the caricature. He’s a jerk.
I don’t think anything of using my name simply because I originally intended to use this space as a way of promoting myself as a music teacher. For the most part, though, I am less concerned with being found here than I am on myspace. I really don’t think I am important enough to be sought out, but I am not so naive that I put just anything up on this blog.
There have been some controversial posts I made concerning the college I attended for my IT degree that I have removed or otherwise censored. That has more to do with my personal ethics (that I just discovered I had) and not wanting the blog be associated with bashing my friends’ workplace. I don’t think my criticism was out of line, but I just don’t think I am the right person to say those things anymore.
So.. it’s not so much that I am concerned with being “found,” but I am increasingly more aware of how someone finds me.