Virtual sharecropping

D’Arcy Norman has a nice post this morning, which is riffing off of a few other posts, that articulates many of my own misgivings about social networking sites.

…we’re all furiously publishing reams of content into various social network applications and services. We post updates to Twitter. We write on walls in Facebook (or, more likely, just play Scrabulous). We post photos to Flickr. We put videos on Google Video, YouTube, and now Flickr.

While all of these activities are valued, and contribute to the sense of online community, they are basically the activities of a sharecropper. Tilling the landowner’s field, toiling in the landowner’s soil, until, eventually, the landowner reaps the rewards.

While I’m getting the feeling I’m pretty high on the list of ugliest blogs sites ever, I do prefer my own space with my own control to the manicured lawns of facebook.