On 10/02/2012 10:05 PM, Jeff Reynolds wrote:
security and personal information aside (very important and bad in my book as
ell) I find that the vast majority of fb communication to be worthless as true
human communication.
I actually was on facebook pretty early on. a couple of clients had wanted to
investigate it so i had to get in and play and later manage their accounts. i
did not like much of the interaction that was happening, but did not care much
as i would find an interested volunteer in each org to take over the upkeep and
take over each one.
At the early time i didn't like the amount of info they asked for and vague
privacy policy so i signed up as fictitious scifi character with a burner email
address. I also did this to see if they could detect faked accounts as well. As
i was not communicating or friending i was very under the radar. then late one
night facebook emailed they wanted a second email address for security
purposes. i was tired and not thinking and used one of my main email addresses
for this. Well i woke up the next morning with a few hundred friend requests!
they of course used the 'security' email address to mine folks address books to
make more connections (many did not realize they were allowing this as well).
So i thought what the heck I'll just go ahead and give it the full look (this
was a couple years back when fb was going ballistic). i instantly had a few
hundred friends going all the way back to high school. I would say 75% of the
friends were folks that i had a very passing association with and had not
communicated with me in any other way in a long time. At first i thought cool,
i can catch up some. Well quickly i found that none would really communicate
other than 3 word posts at time and when i would email them would get little or
nothing back from them. Then the stream of completely inane posts came in, some
of which just reminded me of the worst of high school/adolescent behavior (i
taught high school for a while so got to revisit this first hand as well). Try
as i might to hold any sort of quality communication with this large group of
very diverse folks, nothing worked! It amazed me that it was called social
media. It was the worst aspects of being social, the most shallow, vane and
devoid of any human quality communication.
to end the fb saga and the capper of bad behavior was how i ended up getting
booted. everyone pretty quickly figured out my fb persona and knew my quirky
side and got it and had a laugh. one of the old high school acquaintances (we
ran track together and no real friendship) that had friended me early on kept
sending cause requests for a lot of rather extreme causes. He started emailing
me to ask why i was not joining his causes. I responded very nicely that my
friends are spread across the political spectrum and i learned not to be public
with politics much as any cause would piss off a good fraction of my friends.
He kept at me and I kept trying to say sorry. He finally sent one message that
was pretty angry and then that evening fb busted me for being a potential fake
information. Im sure he was the one that turned me in at that point as i had
survived several years with the fake id. so it was so ironic that i would be
booted by one of the bad behaviors i felt fb was encouraging!
To boot during this time i actually knew and met a few folks that were only
interested in continuing communications if it was only thru facebook, no direct
email. Again i found this so stunning.
The funniest part of all this is im probably one of the most tech of all my
wide circle of friends as well as the one who has always tried to keep in touch
with folks the most, but im not on fb. I have not found fb to increase my
connection to anyone or to have much of anything to do with being social, just
the opposite.
I also have a few friends and clients that are big fb cause promoters. They are
always touting the likes they have and yet when i ask what have they gotten for
action, fund raising, etc out of all this (some invest a lot of money and time
into these), they never have anything solid to point to. they all just fall
into the argument that they have to be represented here and that its important
to have all those likes. it becomes a circular argument.
cheers
jeff
_______________________________________________
Well, Jeff (don't you just 'love' those messages that start "Well" you
know that they are about to stick the boot in), I do agree with almost
all that you have written; but my view of the "whole Facebook
phenomenon" (as cheapo journalists are inclined to call things) is
rather different:
At the risk of offending a lot of people I should like to make a
Biological analogy:
1. We are all born with genitals and sex drives.
2. What we CHOOSE to do with the above is 100% our responsibility.
3. Has anybody heard this sort of statement; "I contacted STDs because
other people started
infecting me whether I wanted it or not".
Now, Facebook is quite similar in an odd sort of way; to which I would
point out:
1. I blocked all messages from my Facebook account(s) to any of my email
accounts on day one.
2. Almost all of the 'friends' on my Devawriter account are blocked from
ANY input on that page
at all: after all this is a page for telling people about my program,
and not for them to tell me about
their latest social something.
3. Cause requests; all of these are suspicious, whether they jive with
my socio-political beliefs or not, so I simply ignore all of them (many
people do NOT know a TV has an OFF button).
4. Stupid online games pushed by 'friends'; ditto - never played a
computer game into 37 years of
programming; can see know reason to start now - I can stroll over to the
park any time I want and have a game of chess, cards or backgammon with
some Bulgarian pensioners, who, no matter how senile they may be, are
1000 times more rewarding than sitting hunched over a VDU in some
semi-darkened room.
I do agree whole-heartedly that Facebook is a flat-liner socially; being
social is about being together in the same space and interacting: - this
is exactly the reason why I phoned my Mum just now instead of sending
her a cold and stagnant email.
5. No addresses, no phone numbers, no pack-drill.
6. If anyone wants to refuse me a job I apply for because I like Devo,
express views that are Right-Wing but also supportive of LGBT rights at
the same time, well they can just go and jump in the lake.
7. Inane postings; I just delete them, and if the inane postings get to
much I write to that 'friend' and if they carry on with the inane
postings I "unfriend" them, not all that complicated.
8. "Like" is like everything else; it reminds me of the semantics of
"nice", a word my Carnoustie Granny
tried her damnedest to expunge from my vocabulary; it shifts around to
the point of being just
a sort of filler word. I don't like very much, and I would far rather
have a graded system from, say, "crap", through "reasonable" to "agree".
9. My Granny would, in all probability, had she encountered Facebook,
described all the business of 'Like' and inane comments, as BLATE (and
that's a good Scots word that is not like 'nice').
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