Lev Grossman wrote a piece for Time on Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies. But aside from being entertaining, it got me to thinking a bit about my own use of Facebook, and why I’m a complete Facebook failure.

I characterize myself as a failure because despite having a Facebook page, I’ve gone to great lengths to be invisible there. Clearly I’m not averse to exposing my opinions or aspects of my life. I write here with regularity, and these posts are even imported into Facebook for anyone to see there. The difference is that you have to come here to see them (or go to my Facebook profile). It requires some small level of intent on your part. You have to be interested enough to click that mouse just once. But Facebook is designed around the notion that whatever anyone you know is doing should be of some level of interest to you all the time. The information, all of it, regardless of how trivial, is aggregated and pushed to your home page. I don’t get that.

The default Facebook settings have an almost voyeuristic bent to them. You see who’s now friends with whom. Who’s in a relationship with whom. Who posted a picture. Who wrote on someone else’s wall. It’s like you’re snooping on them. With their consent of course, but it still feels odd. Some use the tool with a creative twist, but the vast majority of posts amount to a notice that someone you barely remember from high school just baked brownies. Ummm… unless you’re intending to share them with me, I don’t need to know that.

I have reconnected with a couple of old friends there, but mostly it was a way to find an email address I had lost. I’ve also picked up a few entertaining links that people have posted. But by and large I skip over the majority of posts that hit my home page because it seems to me they are none of my business. And I never post trivial status updates or pretty much anything I wouldn’t blog because I don’t think anyone will care and it seems intrusive of me to shove it at them.

Granted, I’m more than a bit of a social recluse, so Facebook isn’t really aimed at my demographic. Perhaps that simply begs the question of why I created a social networking page in the first place. The answer is that I created it out of an intellectual curiosity about popular social networking sites. Which is why I have a MySpace page too, which I find even less useful.

In the end, I suppose this is more of a statement about me than about Facebook. The notion that I would find social gatherings and large circles of friends more comfortable over the Internet than in person is simple sophistry. It would seem that unlike Brad Paisley, I’m so not much cooler online.