You DON'T have Facebook?! (Entry 2)

One common occurrence in my experience as president of SIM Muay Thai is how I will tell members to check the SIM Muay Thai Facebook group for updates and news, and there will be one or two awkward hands (if at all) raised and people declaring "I don't have Facebook." It will be at that point where I'll be thinking of how to proceed from here, because I would not have anticipated that. I keep thinking to myself that this will be an isolated case, but sure enough, with another batch of new trainees, the same issue will come up again and catch me off guard.

Then again, I wonder why this issue seems so foreign to me. With 750 registered Facebook accounts and nearly 7 billion people, we're bound to run in to a few people without an account. The thing is, because of the relatively tech-savvy community we live in, where even my 11-year-old cousin has Facebook (although she shouldn't, plus it's affecting her grades), we assume that the people who don't have Facebook or Twitter are the older generation, Laggards, people who live in rural areas and third-world populations.

Turns out, however, that there are some among us who are still up to date with technology in the general sense (modern cellphones, televisions, laptops, etc) and yet do not use social networking. These are the people who still remember what life was like before Friendster and Myspace and know that humanity can survive without social networking. It is not as essential as email, and most of these people see social networking as a waste of time.

They have a valid concern. Unregulated social networking usage in the workplace has burned up many a man-hour, and social interactions online through Facebook are seen by most as a superficial version of actual interaction. Quoting a comedian I once heard (I think it was Lee Evans): "There was a time where looking at other people's vacation photos was considered a punishment!"

However, I find that using social networking to codify and organize our social interactions really helps. This is especially true in creating events and group pages, because it really facilitates the organizing and the communication process.

It's just those damn Farmville updates that flood my news feed that annoy me.


Let me know in the comments section down below!