I just don't get it. There's a friend of mine, the social justice warrior, college feminist type who posts once every hour and a half for most of the day. Its always something political or social justice related. Same with my other friend except his is just a dumbed down version of it. I use facebook to stay in touch with high school friends, not hear people rant about shit they dislike. I am socially obligated to stay friends or they'll all start bitching, and I'm not savvy enough with Facebook nor do I want to have to hide all of their posts.
This is probably my least in depth post here, but what sort of society do we promote when a social media site becomes the primary means of discourse? What does it say about us and our values? These are actually very uncomfortable posts for me to see; I do not find discussions about gender roles and social justice relaxing nor do I really care about my friends emotional state every hour and a half. I do not care what their professor said nor do I care what their personal view of history is because it is so rarely worth hearing that it might not as well be said.
I understand that people have a penchent for forming uneducated opinions, but before facebook they just never talked about it. I only found out my mom hates piracy this sunday. On Facebook, you can know everyone's views on everything and they will readily give up that information. The presumption is made that people care, and that presumption is validated when they get likes on the status, regardless of reasoning for the likes or what percentage actually liked it.
I knew facebook can be toxic, which is why I really only share some videos I find funny as in jokes for my d&d group or pictures of Wolverine lovingly stroking a picture of Akuma, and by no means am I deep in to facebook culture. But even just checking statuses makes me want to quit again.
Also, the status that set this off was an image macro of Dwight. The rough transcript is "There are women's studies but no men's studies? False. Men's studies is called history."
Fuck, its like they've never taken a history course beyond the basic shit, or never read a book on the subject. Seriously, its not the 1950s and history has progessed quite a few massive steps in understanding how people who weren't males fit in to history.
"It’s been quite a year for us. (My wife has) transitioned from Secretary to Vice President of the XXXXX and her practice has been as busy as she can handle. I mixed my seventh season of XXXXXX, two features, several commercials and a documentary. As we write this, I’m 125,000 words into writing my first novel and (my wife) is 39 weeks into growing our first daughter (we’ve narrowed it down to three or four names). We’re extremely thankful for our good friends and good fortune - we wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from our family to yours. May 2013 be fun, fruitful and fantastic for us all." That's our christmas letter this year, in 14-point text on the back of a 5x7 card photo I took last year, that I had to ride 2,000 miles on a motorcycle and pay $2500 to take. It's costing us about a dollar for every person we reach out to. When it matters, you focus on the broad strokes. One issue with Facebook is that some people think every little thing matters, and some people focus on the broad strokes. Another issue is that you are choosing to interact with people that you would never have chosen to interact with before. I posted this this morning. It contains a great quote: "Facebook fixates the present as always a future past." Photos of trivial events become mementos when viewed twenty years from now; by arranging everything into a "timeline" we automatically associate anything we say or do with historical record. However, most of the snapshots of twenty years ago are only relevant to those in them. Facebook presents an opportunity - and an example to follow - to add to the historical record NOW. There have been a number of witty jibes over the past thousand years that basically boil down to "Hell is a place where everyone is a novelist." The bottom line is that very few people really have much to say most of the time but with Facebook, we're all stuck at a party making inane conversation with people we barely know about things we barely care about AND WE CAN NEVER LEAVE. And, should we wish to have the court recorder wind the testimony back, we can see what everyone said, as they said it, from now until the end of time. Everything ever said by everyone who ever mattered to you even a little bit cannot help but be inane and soul-killing... If you let it. I have friends, and I have Facebook friends. I have never once had a substantive discussion with a friend on Facebook, and when I interact with my real friends, I pretend Facebook doesn't exist. To no one's surprise, those whom I interact with the most are those who are on Facebook the least... it's as if we've all individually decided that life is too important. So even if we had something important to say, we wouldn't say it there... posting a life-changing event in amongst the Instagrams of yesterday's breakfast and tomorrow's craft project can't help but diminish what we say, so why say it? I have, amongst my facebook friends, four felons, two heroin addicts and a convicted murderer. They are not smart people. I enjoy not interacting with them. I also have amongst my facebook friends three of the top screenwriters in Hollywood and a director whose work I find inspiring. I enjoy the opportunity to interact with them when I can. And I have, amongst my facebook friends, several sound supervisors that have hired me for tens of thousands of dollars worth of work. I am thankful for the opportunity to interact with them because getting my name in front of them often earns my daily bread. One thing I do NOT do is pretend they are a homogeneous group, no matter how much Facebook wants to insist they're all my "friends." Facebook is what you make of it. You will find mouth breathers that shouldn't breed. That does not mean you have to humor them. Do your college liberal friend a favor - put her on ignore for a while. You'll like her better.
I like the post, and if you write novels like you write comments I look forward to reading yours. Regarding my liberal college friend, my interaction with her didn't change when I deleted facebook, and it didn't change when I brought it back to use as a way to coordinate events between large groups of people. At this point I do call her friend in the same sense that one calls a person you speak to once maybe every four months on an idle bus ride and in the process you end up arguing that shame tactics are ineffective. The large problem that I have noticed, and bear in mind I do believe I'm one of the younger members here at the age of 21, is that a great deal of people my age begin to act in the outside world like they would in facebook. I've noticed this especially when having historical arguments or arguments about technological progress. Its a style of debate I really first noticed, and then applied retrospectively to a few other debate I have had in the past, which is absolutely infuriating to argue against, because of how it deals with information. The argument I am speaking about was about the inevitability of technological progress, a view that I disagree with based on my observations of how humanity has led its existence. My point was that technological progress is never a guarantee, that the vast majority of inventions are done as short term solutions to problems, and that when you begin to apply a model of continual progress towards a predetermined goal, you overlook the complexity of the process of invention. The steam engine was not created in order to facilitate an Industrial Revolution or bring about wage labor, it was done to bring factories closer to cities because it was more economical. It was done because coal was becoming cheaper, and because the technology to allow for a much more powerful piston had been recently discovered. The computer was originally designed to make calculations easier for AA guns, because they had to track fast moving objects and needed an equally fast way of doing math. The argument was specifically about electric cars, and I took up the stance that a super battery that could last 3000 miles was unlikely to occur without major changes. I still think the idea is too fundamentally different from how society functions, the travel on demand society that we live in today, to catch on, and the progression to that 3000 mile battery is still not guaranteed, and it is not guaranteed to be cheap. The position my friend, who is smart in most other fields, took was that it would happen because technological progress happens. Because it has happened before in other cases, ergo it would happen again. Very simple logic, very hard to argue with, and easy to repeat. That is the style of facebook arguments. Simple things that can be rehashed because they are easy to understand, but contain very little depth of thought. And its hard to argue with because its so damned frustrating; its like swimming against a current, because the logic reinforces itself without use of further evidence. This is perhaps a bit premature of an evaluation how society is changing, but I have noticed it. The evidence is anecdotal, but still, it might as well be out there.
>The large problem that I have noticed, and bear in mind I do believe I'm one of the younger members here at the age of 21, is that a great deal of people my age begin to act in the outside world like they would in facebook. Right there. That's the money quote. Somebody on Reddit once described me as "taking things too personally, like someone who grew up before the Internet." It was one of the most inadvertently insightful comments I'd ever seen, because they were absolutely right: those of us who grew up "without the internet" regard each other in a completely different way than people who grew up with the internet. I don't think most people understand that. A high school experience pre-Facebook, pre-text message, pre-smartphone is a very, VERY different experience from one that incorporates the digital ecosystem. It's a bigger divide than before/after rock'n'roll, before/after the fall of the Berlin Wall, before/after the telephone. Social interaction in a multi-screened environment is wholly and completely different from social interaction when the coolest thing a phone could be was "cordless." HOWEVER You're also trying to have a substantive discussion in a format that declares every carriage return to be a new message. C'mon. Facebook is the thunderous essence of triviality. It isn't designed for deep thought, it's designed for "deep thoughts." Discussing the intricacies of battery technology and their impact on transport on Facebook is kind of like listening to Mussorgsky as recorded by one of those roll-your-own talking greeting cards. The results are going to be a tinny, horrific facsimile of beauty no matter how much you work at it. For a lot of people one paragraph is all they need to say their piece. Give them two and they'll be reduced to a digital case of the umms. More than that, the power of conformity will push them into limiting what they have to say to that paragraph - after all, how many people are going to click on the "keep reading" button so that they'll click through to the "like" button? It's like this: McDonald's has terrible burgers. If you go there looking for a good burger you will be disappointed every time. And yes - if all your friends like to go to McDonald's for their burgers, their palate for decent cooking will atrophy. But as someone who isn't 21, allow me to observe that there are a whole bunch of people in the world that will never. fucking. matter. And to be perfectly honest, it terrifies me to belong to their number. So I strive for more. Clearly, so do you. There are likely people amongst your Facebook friends that feel as you do. Facebook, however, remains the most terrible place you could imagine for determining who they are. Lead a life of substance and do not sweat the trivialities. "You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad." - Adlai Stevenson PS. Assigned reading, whippersnapper: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zipp... http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other...
And you're delusional if you think that you'll ever "fucking matter."
Your gripes sound like many of them are to do with society, and not specifically FB, even if FB makes them more acute. One thing thinking people must learn and try to come to terms with as they age is that most people don't want, and anyway aren't capable of having, an honest, subtle, in depth conversation. This is a cynical and perhaps narcissistic world view, but its also helped me cope with daily life. Give unto Caesar, if you catch my drift.
Enjoy this year KB. My Christmas card from 2010 would have been similar: "It’s been quite a year for us. (My wife has) transitioned from Medical Student to Radiology Resident at XXXXX. I released my second album XXXXXX, transitioned to a new position within our organization, started a website with my good friend and bought a house. As we write this, We are preparing to move to NC from MI. XXXX is 39 weeks into growing our first daughter (we’ve narrowed it down to two names). We’re extremely thankful for our good friends and good fortune - we wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from our family to yours. May 2011 be fun, fruitful and fantastic for us all." I can empathize with how much you have on your plate. Truly, I can. My wife started residency, I essentially started a new job, we moved to another state, bought a house and had a daughter all in the same year. I enjoyed almost every moment of it too. Cheers!
what sort of society do we promote when a social media site becomes the primary means of discourse? What does it say about us and our values?
I recall reading "letters to the editor" that my father would write to our local paper when I was a kid. If he had something "political" to say, he would say it via the "Brighton Argus". He took great pains to make sure what he wrote was accurate, well written and well thought out. He then had to submit it to the paper in hopes that it would be run. Today, anybody can post there political thoughts to Facebook, or any other social media site or aggregator. More people may read your feminist friends posts than read my fathers letters to the editor.what sort of society do we promote when a social media site becomes the primary means of discourse?
I thought this post by khaaan does a nice job of humorously pointing out what social media does, it makes everyone feel like a pundit, an artist, someone with something to say that is worth hearing. Social media just seems to simplify and amplify. It's easier to write that "letter to the editor" and you can potentially reach more people. Everyone loves a microphone.I understand that people have a penchent for forming uneducated opinions, but before facebook they just never talked about it.
Yes they did, they just didn't do it in an online setting so you didn't have to be subject to it (you still don't). They did it around dinner tables, at soccer games, over a beer etc. They couldn't write the editor for every opinion they had but they could espouse those opinions in any social setting. If you didn't like the opinion they were championing you could stop hanging out with them, not sit next to them at the soccer game and stop drinking that beer. Same goes for Facebook, yet on FB people seem less likely to "unfriend" than they are in real life -strange, isn't it?Also, the status that set this off was an image macro of Dwight. The rough transcript is "There are women's studies but no men's studies? False. Men's studies is called history."
I think mk had a comment that summarized my feeling on this quite well because I think you can fit gender in to his response as well -Here it is in context, but he wrote: Personally, I dislike any type of "pride in heritage". IMO your pride should begin and end at your accomplishments and the nature of your character.
I hope that someday all unions of-conditions-that-you-were-born-into will seem an archaic absurdity. Tribalism is one of our worst, and yet most celebrated, traits.
I've been using FB for connecting with my RPG group (we've been playing Eclipse Phase via Skype. It's awesome). People generally post songs and stuff from 9gag and the like. It mostly falls under either of those categories. I once made the mistake of getting into a discussion about space exploration on FB: Someone posted this letter of note, which encourages space exploration, and the person disagreed with it. I had a terrible time making myslef clear. FB wasn't made with long discussions in mind: the lack of markup makes it quite clear. Also, you can't search updates, which makes them disposable. You can always use the hide option: it lets you sort what types of updates you get from your friends (Photos, games, comments, music etc.) without having to unfriend them.
Discuss with your RPG group on Hubski I quit using FB for a while because a higschool girlfriend started posting hateful things about homosexuals. I unfriended her because I would rather remember her as she was prior to having been corrupted by anger and well... religion. But I've been creeping back on the FB as my family and friends request photos of my daughter. I live away from all of them now and they don't see her regularly. I have found myself trying to use Hubski markup on FB comments ;)
I'm friends with a couple of people on Facebook who post way too much. One posts a huge amount of strongly political stuff (most of which I happen to agree with anyway so it doesn't matter so much). The other posts way too many pictures I've seen before of kittens and so on. I didn't want to completely cut myself off from them by hiding all their posts so what I did was, I unsubscribed from them, then I created a friends list for each of them which they were the only person on. So if I ever want to see what they've been posting I just click the list on the left-hand menu and scan their posts quickly. It's not the primary means of discourse, people still see each other in real life. If they stopped doing that I might start getting worried, but I don't think they will. Calm down. There's a skill you should learn, which is how to ignore people, how to stop caring that their views are stupid and wrong. It's a very useful skill to have these days. I admit it's not an easy skill to acquire, but it's a worthwhile one.what sort of society do we promote when a social media site becomes the primary means of discourse? What does it say about us and our values?
As a side note, you can click on the drop-down arrow on the right side of a post in your feed and hit "Hide..." to hide a post. It will also give you a menu that will allow you to reduce the number of posts you see, or unsubscribe from them entirely, without actually removing them from your friend's list. Someone might have already told you in another comment, but I thought I'd mention it since you mentioned you're not overly familiar with Facebook's interface and you didn't want cause a fuss by unfriending them; unsubscribing would cause them to no longer appear on your feed while still allowing you to remain friends with them.