Facebook has 400 million followers and I'm not there

Today, Facebook turns six and celebrates its school-age status with numbers that make even the most optimistic Internet observers pale: a staggering 400 million members, approximately 18 million of whom are Italian. And me? I'm not there. I'm aware that my ouster raises questions among those who have known me for years and are intimately familiar with my professional past (and present). Yet? I'm not there. The reasons could be multiple, but they're all quite understandable. I'm not there because I don't see any added value in Facebook for my professional development or my personal life. I'm not there because anyone who wants to find me knows how. Simply typing my name and surname into Google is proof of this. After all, even you, reading my post, could confirm this.

I'm not here because I have little time and the little I have left over the day and week I prefer to dedicate to other things. I'm not here because the word "friendship" makes me smile, which I've always paid a lot of attention to, and finding thousands if not millions of friends would scare me since to I'd like to give my friends my full attention. I'm not here because if I want to talk to someone, all I have to do is pick up a phone, or better yet, dial numbers on a cell phone, and hear a voice answer without having to display an emoticon to convey my mood. I'm not here because I haven't figured out how to spend all my time chatting when a workday is at least 8 hours. I'm not here because I've always used chat tools (so much so that I even wrote a post about them), and the ones I use are simple and unobtrusive, especially since they respond to my actions. I'm not here because I don't want to tell the world I'm angry or happy, because after all, what could anyone possibly care about? I'm not here because I don't want to filter out the occasional douchebag I've never paid attention to in my life and who suddenly finds myself a "friend." It's not a good gesture of etiquette, or rather, netiquette, to reject a friendship. I'm not here because, after all, my presence would bring the number of registered Italians to 18.1 million and no one would notice. I'm not here because I've never felt the need, yet I don't feel alone. I'm not here, and I don't know if one day I will be. On the web, as in life, after all, never say never.