Husband has recently been fiddling around with Facebook in an effort to understand its appeal to the Young Folk.  Not wanting to be left out I done got me one o' them critters m' self.

At first I thought the whole thing was a bit (a) fatuous (b) puerile and (c) pointless, but having played with it quite a bit when I should have been transcribing interviews or reading Very Hard Books I'm really beginning to warm to it.

Strangely, since Facebook is a so-called Social Networking Site, its appeal to me is directly related to my lifelong difficulty in making friends.  Because I'm articulate and funny, people mistake me for an extrovert (if that binaried nomenclature has any real validity) when I am in fact a much stranger beast, an introvert in search of an audience.  This is to say, I find the company of others both frightening and draining (the more so when they are strangers) but I'm driven to perform a version of myself to entertain these fearful entities, in order to feel part of the human race.

This need to 'dance my dance' has resulted in my keeping not one but four, count 'em, four blogs (all with pretty much identical content): A Lull in the Proceedings (LJ), Thinking of Wittering (blogger), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (wordpress) and Celia Johnson's Enormous Face (blog.co.uk).  Lull was my first foray into the blogosphere and initially the LJ friending mechanism drove me to distraction.  I longed for friends but could never decipher the protocols for making it happen.  I'd gaze enviously at other people's friends lists, darkly muttering 'nobody loves me, everybody hates me, going down the garden to eat worms'.  Things got so bad that I had to lay off the whole blog thing for a couple of years until I'd calmed down.  It only got better when I realised what I was doing and came to appreciate that, as in fleshworld, I am a creature who requires a few, close friends and a big audience.

So where does Facebook fit in?  Well, with the fear of other people comes the retincence, the feeling that any personal communication from me could only ever be regarded as an impertinence and an imposition.  My habit is, therefore, to lose touch with people, even those I really like, rather than engender in them an imagined irritation.  Facebook, however, with its poking and message walls, aquariums and gardens, allows me to send gentle and not-very-importunate reminders of my existence that require no more response than the occassional poke back to let me know I'm still human.  Furthermore, its endless array of personality-divulging titivations, which inform the world of your favourite books, films, TV show, backpacking holidays, llama farms and so on, have enormous appeal for my Inner Performer.

So now, while I still think Facebook is fatuous and puerile, I no longer think it useless.

MySpace though - that's just ugly!