Down with Facebook!

@nimh,

see, and i totally don't get twitter. don't know what to do there. it's like a series of status updates....except those are the most annoying part of facebook. hm, maybe i'll look around a bit more there.

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@Robert Gentel,

Who said anything about the technology?

While I am happy for you and others who have found a less twittery use for the site, and my post was somewhat hyperbolous, nonetheless the place seems specially set up for, well, twittering.

And, twittering in birds is all about "Me! Here I am!!! Mine!!!"

That there appear to be millions of people who wish either to receive brief updates on what their friends are doing, or to send such updates TO their friends on what THEY are doing, on what I find a nauseatingly regular basis, is of surprise to me.

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@nimh,

nimh wrote:

OK.

So ... as irony would have it, I joined Twitter just now, just so as to follow Christopher Walken, who's craftily hilarious.

Hey, I never said I was consistent.

Mercurial little...er...what the hell IS your avatar?????...aren't you?

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http://www.cleeseblog.com/podpress_trac/web/37/0/JC_on_Twittering.mov

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i know twitter is popular among tecchie people - sharing links to websites, opining about technology and whatnot
also journalists or other professional folks - people who share brief news "hey go look there, great article"...etc. to me it is less useful, so i'm not there.

on the other hand facebook has been useful - i have at least 10 friends who do important social activism through fb (israel-palestine, armenia-azerbaijan, homeless kids...), 2 run a presidential campaign for the (hopefully) next slovak president - hugely popular and successful so far. one teacher from croatia runs an online holocaust museum for his students through facebook --- all of those are facebook to me. the rest is noise.

i believe that robert is right - the medium is just a lifeless form. the end result is exactly what you make it to be. i have deleted a number of annoying "friends" who used facebook to flaunt themselves around- i've no need for them. and i befriended a number of people i previously didn't know and who turned out to be most valuable contacts- professionally as well as humanly.

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RJ, you hit the nail on the head here -

Quote:

These are all just means of communication. If it's that dull then you and the people you communicate with are just not very interesting.

Don't you get that this is the point? The vast majority of people any of us know and communicate with are dull and uninteresting. I could give two shits about the events that happen in the lives of 99% of the people I've met during my life.

I agree with the OP - Facebook is masturbatory bullshit. Sure, people might refer to it as merely a tool or method of communication. But it is effectively a gossip site for people who would rather look at pictures of other people's lives then actually live their own life.

Cycloptichorn

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@Cycloptichorn,

hm, can't agree with that. 99% of my friends are certainly not dreadfully dull.

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@dagmaraka,

Hmmm...you just mentioned something that might be useful to me....ie sharing urls etc for useful resources with a large group.

I can do that easily via email, though.

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@dlowan,

not always....besides you might annoy awful lot of people that way...while if you post it on fb or twitter, they have a choice...it's not in their personal mailbox. i myself would prefer that kind of information out there and not in my mailbox.

same with work stuff -- announcing events (a GREAT tool on fb), doing campaigns (some...those that actually translate into real life - not all do), etc. -- i pick what i want on fb and it doesn't flood my email -- plus i find WAY more than i ever would relying just on my mailbox.

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@dagmaraka,

dagmaraka wrote:

hm, can't agree with that. 99% of my friends are certainly not dreadfully dull.

If you read closely you'll note that I said '99% of the people I've met' not '99% of my friends.' Big difference. And that's one of the major problems with Facebook; every jackass in the world who ever met you thinks you still want to be friends with them. I don't want to be friends with any of them and certainly don't care about their stupid updates or their pictures or any of that bullshit.

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

dagmaraka wrote:

hm, can't agree with that. 99% of my friends are certainly not dreadfully dull.

If you read closely you'll note that I said '99% of the people I've met' not '99% of my friends.' Big difference. And that's one of the major problems with Facebook; every jackass in the world who ever met you thinks you still want to be friends with them. I don't want to be friends with any of them and certainly don't care about their stupid updates or their pictures or any of that bullshit.

Cycloptichorn

well why would you be "friends" with all the people you ever met on facebook? you certainly don't have to be - i am not. i decline people all the time and select those i need to be in touch with. again - it is what you make it to be.

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@dagmaraka,

dagmaraka wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

dagmaraka wrote:

hm, can't agree with that. 99% of my friends are certainly not dreadfully dull.

If you read closely you'll note that I said '99% of the people I've met' not '99% of my friends.' Big difference. And that's one of the major problems with Facebook; every jackass in the world who ever met you thinks you still want to be friends with them. I don't want to be friends with any of them and certainly don't care about their stupid updates or their pictures or any of that bullshit.

Cycloptichorn

well why would you be "friends" with all the people you ever met on facebook? you certainly don't have to be - i am not. i decline people all the time and select those i need to be in touch with. again - it is what you make it to be.

Oh, it's not that I would tell you not to use it; people can do what they like, after all. It's just been my experience that the vast majority of facebook is pointless and dull gossiping, centering around the most superficial aspects of life and mirroring much of the socially stratifying **** that I don't bother dealing with in RL, so why would I do so online?

Cycloptichorn

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@dagmaraka,

No, that's exactly the same impression I have, which is why I didnt - and still dont, really - see the point of joining.

But I came across this link to Christopher Walken's twitter, and his, uh, "tweets" (yuck) are really funny ... and I couldnt think of another way to keep being reminded of them than joining the damn thing. (When I bookmark stuff I just instantly forget about them.)

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@nimh,

ah, i see. ok, i've read a few following your link. he's amusing...but, same problem as with the first post here - he so loves to listen to himself....gets tiresome (to me) after 10-2o posts.
but we all like different things, and i think it's great that there are so many different tools out there to make people's lives easier.

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@Cycloptichorn,

sure, if it's of no use to you, why use it.

i use it for professional contacts to a large extent, another group is theatre friends...none of what i use facebook for now can be done nearly as easily elsewhere.

as for the pointless and dull gossiping -- that would bore me too. facebook consists of exactly the people you select it to be - thus it can be dull or it can be a professional network - entirely up to you.

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@dagmaraka,

Eh. Course they're not, but even interesting friends spend 99% of their life - ok, fine, 80% of their life - doing dull things. We all do: sleeping, eating breakfast, commuting, a fair share of our work, waiting in line, doing the weekend's shopping, cleaning the toilet. Or maybe not exactly dull; I enjoy myself through much of those activities (not the toilet cleaning though): but not share-worthy.

And that's the point with the kind of communication the status update-focused Facebook encourages, versus the kind that email encourages, versus the kind old letter writing did. I know interesting people who are not inside my intimate circle so they're not part of my day-to-day life, but who do interesting things and live interesting lives and who are, far more importantly, nice -- so I love to hear from them occasionally. And to keep in touch with them: you know, flesh out an email with the highlights or most important stuff of your past month or something, the stuff you'd share in a personal conversation. But how many people do you really want to receive day-by-day, morning-to-afternoon updates of what they're doing from?

Apparently, a lot of people want to receive exactly that from a lot of other people, dozens even. That kind of dismays me. I mean, whatever, to each his own and all that, I wouldn't stop them or anything - but I still have a feeling about it. One much like the OP's.

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@dagmaraka,

dagmaraka wrote:

it can be dull or it can be a professional network - entirely up to you.

What do you actually do with an online professional network? I mean, one that goes beyond the colleagues and partners you're working with, whom you'll already be in contact with by email / phone / chat? Serious question.

I'll immediately admit I'm a lousy networker in any realm - I wanna be friends with people or I dont, and I'm really bad at maintaining contacts just for career purposes or something. But I did join LinkedIn a year ago or so, because everyone did and it's supposed to be a career-building tool (yuck .. but you gotta do what you gotta do). But I still havent discovered any use for it. What kind of messages do you send, or what kind of people do you contact, through such an online professional network that you wouldnt just use email for?

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@dlowan,

I'm a bread. Or to be more specific, Bernd das Brot!

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@nimh,

i do purges of the "dull gossipers" that update their status about sleeping, going to work, drinking coffee and whatnot. i keep those who use it to good end, and i also keep a good number of just good real life friends (some of whome are indeed gossipers). if they get annoying with their updates , i click "hear less about XY" and then their status updates just don't appear in your roll. and voila- you get a customized roll of updates from people you actually want to hear from for whatever reasons you may have. Besides, nobody is obliged to post status updates - many people ignore them entirely and don't update them whatsoever. it's not like you MUST report on every dump you take if you're on facebook - depends on who you are. if one is a bore in real life, one is a bore of course on facebook as well.... and why would i keep such people among my fb acquaintances? i sure as hell would not. i don't care for morning-to-afternoon day-by-day updates from anyone either. that's not what facebook is to me at all.

but i use it mostly for professional events - workshops, seminars, meetings, screenings. my work office has an account, too - it's a great circulation tool for new newsletter issue, for important web update, and again - most importantly for events.

anyhoo, i use it a lot and enjoy it a lot. been on myspace too but that doesn't come anywhere near, that just got boring (i.e. useless - to me) very soon.

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@dagmaraka,

Quote:

but i use it mostly for professional events - workshops, seminars, meetings, screenings. my work office has an account, too - it's a great circulation tool for new newsletter issue, for important web update, and again - most importantly for events.

Amazing for me to hear this, as I can't imagine anyone I professionally interact with doing business of any sort over facebook!

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

Down with Facebook!

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