From The Millions: The Perils of Literary Social Networking

[Matt, e-monk]

A few years ago, a woman I hardly know and whose name I’ve now forgotten invited me to become her friend on Goodreads, a social-networking site on which users log the books they’re reading (or have read, or intend to read), and in some cases write casual reviews of these books and rate them on a scale of one to five stars. I thanked the woman but told her I didn’t participate in social-networking websites. Because, I didn’t elaborate, I found them more estranging than connecting, or suspected I would, and because I didn’t want to turn myself into some kind of product (not true: in my huffing, protracted climb from anonymity to obscurity, I’ve attempted quite a lot of that), and because I was very tired, and finally because I couldn’t afford another distraction from my writing or from checking my email forty times a day. I’ve since softened my position on all this and now have an impressive though not obscene number of friends on Facebook. Sometimes these nominal friendships bring into depressing relief my paucity of substantive friendships, but on the whole I’d say I’m slightly less lonely and no less productive (which is to say: not terribly productive) than I was before I joined Facebook. But this essay, if that’s what it is, isn’t about Facebook (boring), it’s about Goodreads (sort of)...



http://www.themillions.com/2010/08/ba...

[Patrick, The Special School Bus Rider]

I tried reading that article but wanted to just fall asleep the way Hicks describes gratefully falling asleep at the end of his essay. Does he means to be ironic and commit the fallacy of the imitative form by being horribly boring or as one of our moderators would have posted: A few years ago, a woman I hardZzzzz...

[Adrian]

Well, yeah, the writer is performing a bit of a literary cakewalk here, but that's a "peril" of being a blogger.

[Patty, free birdeaucrat]

This dude is mental.