(The article excerpts)
"Social networking site Facebook is five years old this week, but I won't be wasting time 'poking' cyber friends - that's contacting them to you and me - and celebrating online."
"Nothing sums up the shallow world we live in more than a group of people chatting away to each other for hours each day via sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook."
"Have these sad characters got nothing better to do? What is it about the real world that they find so unappealing?"
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"I am proud to say I have real friends, with their little weird ways, their shortcomings, their obsessions, their strange eating habits and their wonderful gossip."
"Acquiring real friends is a delicate ritual which involves reading the other person's body language, carefully checking that you share the same interests and testing their sense of humour."
"It's fraught with difficulties and takes great patience; but ultimately it's thoroughly rewarding."
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"We share our leisure time, walking, going to silly films, belonging to book clubs, dragging each other along to WeightWatchers."
"Compare what you can experience with a real friend to what you get from a cyber-crony. Hours of tapping at a keyboard while your backside expands. Chatting without hearing the tone of their voice or reading their gestures and facial expressions."
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"We have our feuds and periods of 'non-speakers' from time to time (I admit I am not the easiest person in the world to get on with), but I know that if I feel a bit lonely, or need cheering up, I can call one of them up, have a chat, meet for a meal or a drink, and afterwards I'll feel better."
"And - best of all - it's not something that anyone else need know about. I don't bore the rest of the world outside my best friends with my anxieties, my miseries and my objects of hatred. I have my own website - but it's not interactive. The time I spend each week in chat-rooms is precisely zero."
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"If all that is depressing enough, my central objection, as I have already said, is the detrimental effect Facebook has on real relationships."
"Time and again, people who use Facebook regularly find that their partners feel left out of their online circle, that they resent the swopping of injokes, private confidences and personal chat, and, most of all, the time it consumes."
"I have been cheered recently, though, by the news that an increasing number of users are committing what is known as 'Facebook suicide' - erasing their profiles and returning to life in the real world, presumably sick of the shallow allure of living your life in cyber space."
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"But I worry that millions of others - and especially the young - may be losing the social skills they need to lead fulfilled lives, hold down a job and communicate effectively and honestly with their partners. In short, by logging on, they are tuning out of reality."
"One of my pals recently told me he had joined a social networking site. I was incredulous. Secretly I thought: Is he so miserable with his real friends that he needs a load of nonjudgmental new ones? Has he no shame?"
"I don't need the validation of hundreds of cyber-friends on Facebook. And neither should anyone else."
(Full article at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1138445/Janet-Street-Porter-Why-I-hate-Facebook.html)
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My reason for joining Facebook? Wanted to look at a long lost friend's who is now in U.K, when we finally managed to have each other's email add, she said that she had been trying to find me there...
of course she is there much longer than me, I guess when she first started, I was not even aware of this Facebook thingy!..ha ha ha...
mmm...I haven't checked mine for quiet a while now...
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