More Like Bore-Square

This is not a knock on everyone I know who uses this service. I encourage them to continue if they are so compelled.

But I fucking hate Foursquare.

It's not that I don't like social media, I do. I've Myspaced, I've Facebooked. I've even Friendstered. I half-heartedly digi-schmooze on LinkedIn, I feel the pulse of the online world with Twitter and I've been blogging since blogging didn't mean anything more than spewing 19 year-old turn-of-the-millennium angst all over Livejournal and Xanga.

This also goes beyond the fact that I find geolocation kind of creepy to the point where I won't even let Twitter broadcast the location of my Tweets.

Something about Foursquare just feels wrong. One of the greatest facets of the social Web is its ability to connect disparate people living in an age that feels increasingly disconnected. Our albums have been reduced to lists of titles in iTunes, our books have been relegated to 7-1/2" x 5" prisons of e-ink and just when we think we, too, might be swallowed, lost and pulled under by the ethereal waves of the binary tide these sites allow us to create chains of commonality and pull ourselves back to somewhat analog ground. Though we can't hear, we talk; though we can't feel, we touch. In that service, however, this service is both far too much and far too little.

Foursquare is one-dimensional in the way everyone feared Twitter would be - and indeed often forces Twitter and Facebook to their least creative denominators. It shouts for attention without giving anything back. It's nice that you're at the beach. Tell me: How's the view? Tell me: Is the water warm? Tell me: What does the cool breeze feel like coming off the water? Tell me anything other than the mere fact that you're there. While other platforms require an action or an investment from its members this one requires only that they show up. In a network television world of social media Foursquare would be the Jersey Shore.

The most annoying, frustrating, heartbreaking, coldly mechanical thing about Foursquare, though, is the core idea that users earn points for going about their lives. In the universe this technology creates the payoff for new finding new locations and making new discoveries is another step toward a meaningless achievement trophy instead of these experiences being their own reward. Breadth of life reduced to a collection of merit badges. Stopping to smell the roses only after updating "Hey! I'm at the rose garden!"

This idea that the quirks and flourishes of our everyday should be so marginally quantified is foreign to me and I have a horrible aversion to the notion that shopping and eating and drinking and walking and sunning and swimming and living in the moment should be stripped down, sterilized and scored.

Maybe all this makes me sound like the old guy screaming at the kids to get off his lawn, and maybe - at the ripe old age of 27 - that's who I am. So I guess it's time for me to close the laptop, crack open a book, lay needle to wax and not bother caring if nobody knows about it.