"I shot a man in Reno."

I don't social media. (Yeah, I blog, but like 10 people read this thing and maybe three semi-regularly comment and one is my brother. Really, this blog is about as social as I am in real life.) Nearly three years ago, I killed my Facebook and MySpace accounts, among others. I didn't get the point and found myself feeling obligated for keeping the things updated because they were supposedly about keeping in touch with people. I never like the places, but I had joined anyway because that's what we're supposed to do, right?

Since my sister-in-law and brother had their daughter I seen my mother use her Facebook nearly every day. At first she mostly checked for new baby pictures because the two "grown-ups" in the growing family were pretty crappy about e-mailing pictures of the baby, but it seemed like a new photo of her appeared on Facebook each day. Now my mom uses Facebook to play games mostly.

In November, Heels basically announced that she's not going to blog anymore. Nothing to post, she said. Didn't like worrying about having content to post, she said. And I get that. In the past three and a half month I've posted like a dozen times. (I did way better when I had to e-mail posts in from work because I couldn't get to Blogger.) The difference between me and her, though, is that she still posts stuff to Facebook, probably to Twitter, too, but that's blocked to outsiders. (Okay, her Facebook is blocked, too, but my mom is a friend of Heels and every now and then my mom fills me in on what Heels has posted there. Creepy.)

The thing is, she makes announcements there. The last one that I read was that the Heels/Logic family has found a place to live up in Portland. That couldn't have been a blog post?

I don't mean to pick on Heels. She's my friend and has been for a long time and hopefully will for a long, long time. It's just knowing that there are these bits of information that I can't get to, but could. I could if only I re-joined Facebook or got a Twitter account. It's just that easy. I know it is. And I don't have to do anything, really, except friend the people I want to friend and anger/disappoint the people I don't friend. Hell, I wouldn't have to twit. I wouldn't have to put up a picture of myself and I could ignore the kittens that are thrown at my wall. And I'd still get to see what my friends have to say.

The problem is they never say enough. Not for me, at least. I want to know more than just the 140 (or whatever) characters. I don't like the bullshit of the "liking" of the posts. (Seriously, someone writes that his 15-year old cat died and 37 people "like" it? What the fuck?) The discourse under a post seems to be people saying the exact same thing in different ways. That's not communication. I don't know what it is, but it's not really communicating with each other. It's like people are shortening their thinking into bumper sticker length thought and then setting out to find other people to agree with them. (And help then grow people in Farmville or doing "jobs" in Mafia Wars or whacking things in Bush Whacker.) What is that, really? Is it something that I want?

No. I don't think I do. I don't want to think in snippets. It's bad enough that I think I think in paragraphs rather than essays, I don't want that shortened to thinking in only sentences.

I'm not going to rejoin Facebook. I'm not going to join Twitter. I'm going to continue to miss what little people are saying and I really do miss it. But social media just isn't for me. Not at this point. Maybe if I ever start my own business. Yeah, probably then.