Tag social networking

Anti-Social

By Brian Filed in Site Tagged with blogging, Facebook, Site, social networking June 14th, 2010 @ 11:32 am

On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am also annoyed by people who feel the need to crosspost each and every thing they say on their blog on Facebook AND Twitter AND LinkedIn AND whatever other fad-of-the-week social site they just signed up for. Sorry, pals, you’re just not THAT fascinating. And I don’t want to be accused of the same shameless self-promotion.

Also, I don’t really like the idea that everything in the online world has to be seen through the filter of Facebook. It really defeats the sense of exploration that makes going online an interesting endeavor for me and reduces everything to just another commodity to be peddled. Monolithic entities like Facebook and Google and Microsoft are antithetical to the chaotic spirit of the Internet and lessen its real impact by overconcentrating.

I still think it’s a damn shame that Facebook killed personal blogging, but blogging was actually a very imperfect tool for people who were looking for a way to engage in personal interaction. Facebook is similarly very imperfect, but comes a lot closer, as long as you are satisfied with very superficial interaction. From the looks of things, it’s pretty clear that a vast majority of people are really only capable of that vapid communication in the first place. What gets lost on Facebook is the exchange that would happen when someone wrote a thoughtful or moving or infuriating blog post that could trigger comments and counterposts and e-mail and friendships and feuds. Absolutely none of that happens by clicking the “I Like This!” button. Last year around this time, I wrote that I thought there could be a renaissance of personal blogging once all the poseurs and wanna-bes had been sucked into the Facebook vortex, but I haven’t seen it happen. More’s the pity, because I think the people who really fit the blogger mold are still out there and might still have something to say.

It’s A Small World After All

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Life, Misc, Site Tagged with blogging, Facebook, Site, social networking November 24th, 2009 @ 11:46 am

I caved in on my intended three-month hiatus from Facebook this morning. I lasted two months, which isn’t too shabby. It was a good break, and it spurred me to make a whole slew of changes in my online life: I canceled my Twitter account outright, I purged my RSS feeds and discovered a variety of other sites I hadn’t seen before, and my interest in this site was rejuvenated. I also had to come to terms with leaving a website I had been very involved with for a long time, which was painful but ultimately the right thing for me to do for my own good.

I still have some issues with the nature of the discourse on Facebook. As online communities have flourished and fallen over the years, it seems that the good ones are those that carefully balance substantive discussion and the tendency of online people to fall back on snark and fatuous quipping. There’s room for both, but the sites that try too hard to be earnest and sincere tend to become either sanctimonious or batshit-insane, and the sites that never get beyond quips and snark devolve into constant games of one-upsmanship that can be entertaining but ultimately pointless. Facebook suffers from the latter, along with a few other borderline tendencies. I do think, though, that as long as one is attuned to these tendencies, it’s possible to make use of the site; the trick is not succumbing to the temptation of playing the game.

Back at the beginning of October, I said that I believed that blogging would have to pretty much die out before it could begin again the way it was at the beginning — small clusters of people writing and commenting on one another’s writing — but it would appear that day is still far off. Getting back to the business of posting most days of the week has been a good exercise for me, but blogging is still busy dying rather than waiting to be reborn. My decision to start participating on Facebook again despite its many drawbacks is a solid acknowledgment of that fact. What has to change in the meanwhile, I think, is how I make use of this website to get beyond the blog model that has propelled it for almost a decade.

Twits In SPAAAAAAAAACE!

By Brian Filed in Links, Science Tagged with "Hello From Earth", Australian National Science Week, COSMOS Magazine, social networking, Twitter August 12th, 2009 @ 11:57 am

In 1977, as part of the Voyager space probe program, NASA chartered scientist Carl Sagan and a blue-ribbon panel to put together a recording of sounds, music, and languages to represent the people and other life on Earth. Imprinted on a disc of gold, the recordings were accompanied by pictographs depicting our planet’s location, solar system, instructions on how to play the recording, and even drawings of a man and woman with hands raised in greeting. The disc was attached to the Voyager 1 probe, which left our solar system in 1990, will take 40,000 years to reach the closest star system that could host inhabited planets. Carl Sagan wrote about the disc’s intent:

“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Now, thirty-two years later, humanity once again reaches out into the cold black void of interstellar space and calls out to see if anyone is there…only this time in the form of Twitter. “Hello From Earth.net” is a project from the Australian science magazine COSMOS as part of the Australian government’s National Science Week. They’ve arranged to beam a radio transmission through the auspices of NASA and the Deep Space Communication Complex in Canberra at a planet that was discovered orbiting the star Gliese 581, one of the 100 stars closest to our solar system. The transmission will consist entirely of text messages submitted by the public, each one 160 characters in length (20 characters more than you can enter in a Twitter message).

Hello From Earth is accepting messages until 0700 GMT, Monday August 24, so you have a couple of weeks to tweet to the stars, if you are so inclined.

What are the People Of Earth saying to our far-flung brethren? Here are a few of the most popular submissions so far:

Hi There: Sorry about the Outer Limits; hope you enjoyed I Love Lucy. Have you got all our missing socks? Love, Earth
Fred Mason
Roberts Creek, Australia

How come you never call anymore? and also, I tried adding you on facebook many times but had no response. If its about the drinking…I can change
Jono
Melbourne, Australia

hereby volunteer for the first inter-species breeding program. HELLO LADIES! Lets get to know each other over a nice glass of blue milk.
matt jivin
new york, United States

That humming sound you hear off in the distance is Carl Sagan spinning in his grave, billions and billions of times per second.

Linkapalooza 03/06/09 – The Economy

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, FDR, Francis Perkins, Great Depression, LinkedIn, social networking, unemployment, YouTube March 5th, 2009 @ 2:55 pm

To go along with my rant, here are some linky items about the economy:

We’ll start with this illustrated audio clip of Franklin Roosevelt speaking in front of Madison Square Garden in 1936, as he was running for his second term (via Crooks & Liars). Though there are some crying “enough” with the comparisons of Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, the simple reality is that there is a great deal to compare, if not in the men themselves, then certainly in the situations they found themselves in as they took office. By 1936, the initial efforts of the Roosevelt administration to resolve the banking crisis had been successful, and he was trying to move forward with the broader stimulus efforts of the New Deal, and yet FDR was still faced with stubborn do-nothing opposition from the Republican Party. Roosevelt, however, recognized the position he was in as one of strength and used it to clobber the Republicans into near-total irrelevance for the next dozen years. A certain secret Muslim non-American Communist terrorist gun-hating bomb-thrower-loving scary black man I can think of ought to be keeping this in mind.

One of the key players in the Roosevelt Administration was Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins. Perkins had served under FDR while he was governor of New York as the state’s Commissioner of Industry and had fought for many reforms to the state: minimum wage laws, capping the number of work hours in a week for women, and unemployment insurance among them. She was the first woman to hold a cabinet position and was one of only two members of FDR’s cabinet to serve for the entire duration of his presidency. As Secretary of Labor, it was her agenda that led to the creation of Social Security and federal minimum-wage laws. Writing at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, University of Chicago historian Christine Stansell reviews a new biography of Perkins that tries to expand on the personal side of Perkins’ life more than the professional, but Perkins is not generally well-known in modern times so any book about her remakrable accomplishments is worth a look.

Here’s Captain Obvious with a bulletin for you: Advertising Age reports that the struggling economy and huge increase in the number of people out of work has been a serious boom for job-hunter social networking site LinkedIn. They’ve doubled their monthly number of visitors over this time last year, snagging 7.7 million visitors per month, and presently have 36 million registered users. Now, by comparison, Facebook has over 90 million members, but most of them are already employed and spending their days goofing off playing on Facebook.

Just in case you missed it, on Tuesday the New York Times editorial board came right out and said what a lot of us have been saying lately: it’s time for President Obama to stop bailing out the banks, nationalize them temporarily, eliminate the bad ones, stabilize the good ones, and tell the fucking Republicans to STFU about “socialism”. If it were me, I’d also fire Timothy Geithner and find somebody to run Treasury who wasn’t beholden to Wall Street, and then I’d sharpen up my guillotine and start publicly executing some bank executives, but I guess that’s why Obama’s the president and not me.

Everybody’s favorite “jealous putz”, the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, wasn’t very happy with the non-answers he was getting from Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben “Bailout” Bernanke about where the money was going, so now he’s proposing legislation to force the Fed to disclose the names of institutions they have lent money to since March 2008 and provide full details about the amounts and the rationales for making said loans. Bernie’s website includes the text of the legislation and a video clip of him chewing on Bernanke’s ass.

Lastly, I’m sure you remember that I have posted a couple of times about the severity of the economic situation in Iceland. Iceland, Latvia, and a few other small nations have been hit especially hard because their tiny economies were not capable of withstanding the strain from the failures of their national banks due to overzealous speculation. The government in Iceland collapsed recently (with the unintended and somewhat irrelevant side effect of bringing to power the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister), people are beginning to protest with pitchforks and torches (literally), and it’s looking like Iceland will have to adopt the Euro as its currency, because the Icelandic krona is now worthless (take THAT Zimbabwe!).

The latest issue of Vanity Fair has a fantastic in-depth feature piece by journalist Michael Lewis about what’s going on in Iceland these days and how they screwed the pooch in the first place. Turns out it’s all the fault of the men, who basically still act like drunken Vikings on shore leave. And, in case you’re wondering, everybody in Iceland DOES know Björk, so shut up about it.
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And Now A Few Words From The Pontiff

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with Facebook, Holocaust denial, hypocrisy, pareidolia, Pope Benedict XVI, Roman Catholic Church, social networking, YouTube January 27th, 2009 @ 1:34 pm

1. Denying that the Holocaust ever happened is perfectly okay, as long as you say it in Latin.

2. Being a drug smuggler, on the other hand, will get you kicked out on your ass. But, don’t worry, because our secret tribunal really isn’t a torture chamber…any more…

3. Only His Holiness will determine which pieces of toast REALLY have pictures of Jesus on them, and which ones are fake. Plus, we want a 5% finder’s fee on anything you sell on eBay that even remotely looks like anyone.

4. Facebook is bad…really, really bad. But YouTube is where the action is, kids, so come watch my videos and vote them up-up-UP!

In Nomine Patri et Fili et Spiritu Sanctu, Amen.

I Got, Like, Totally Faced, Man

By Brian Filed in Life Tagged with Facebook, Life, Orkut, social networking, Twitter January 22nd, 2009 @ 1:11 pm

Remember Orkut? It’s Google’s social networking app that debuted in 2004 and became all the rage among the digerati for a while, especially since you had to be invited to be able to sign up for the service. Well, it wasn’t all that hard to get an invite, and so people descended on the thing like hungry locusts, tossing around invites like so much confetti, and for a while it seemd like Google had “done it again”. Except nobody had bothered to really think about what the hell they were supposed to do with it, and when it became readily apparent after about three months that there wasn’t anything to do with it except invite people and build buddy lists, everybody stopped using it. Except the Brazilians. Orkut transformed into the single most popular social networking application in Brazil, and is now mostly in Portuguese, catering to the interests of a much more specialized group.

That was my first exposure to social networking, and as such turned into the formative experience that led me to avoid the more recent fad for social networking websites. After all, how different could they be from Orkut when you got right down to it, and how long would it take for them to similarly collapse like neutron stars and become singularities?

About six months ago, though, I joined Twitter. Twitter seems to have reduced the concept down to the barest elements. The 7th-Grade cliquish crap of adding and deleting friends is still a large motivator for the whole thing, but the interaction has been reduced to tiny messages. It’s the bastard stepchild of social networking and instant messaging, and the appeal to people who wanted to blog but couldn’t come up with anything to say day after day was huge. It didn’t bowl me over, and I discovered that I really didn’t have anything to say that could be reduced to 140 characters, so I don’t use it all that much. When I do use it, I have to wade through a few people who either have to post every little thing they do all day (“Going to wipe my ass just as soon as the rest of this turd comes out”) or post vague and inscrutable statements that only mean something inside their own minds. I probably only check it once a week and find I am not missing all that much.

So yesterday, after much consideration, I joined Facebook (NOTE: you have to BE a Facebook member to visit that link), since it seems that over the past year it has gone completely mainstream. As somebody who usually gets in on the ground floor of a lot of aspects of digital life, it seemed like I was overdue to have this experience. That was completely confirmed for me as I went through the signup process and Facebook sucked up all my contact list data and started showing me how many of my very non-digital friends were long-time members. Other people have commented on discovering that their grandmother or their parents were on Facebook, and while that isn’t the case for me, I did find my youngest brother and a whole bevy of people that I would never have expected would be on board.

Quite frankly, that tells me that Facebook and MySpace and the other big-time social networking sites are about to turn into the next AOLs, if they haven’t already. Your hip, cool young person does not want to be associated with his or her grandma on a social website, and if it’s something that has gotten tame enough for grandma to use, there must be something cooler and edgier. For us middle-aged geezers, it’s clear that the whole appeal of the site is to look up old acquaintances and make fun of the ones that have gotten fatter/balder/saggier than you and burn with jealousy over the ones who are more successful/thinner/married-up than you. But once every 40-something in America has had a good chuckle at their senior class rival, they’re going to stop looking at the site and go find some more porn to watch online.

The other evening at the “career transition” support group I attend, one of the women, who was laid off from an executive secretarial job after 20 years and is having a hard time adjusting to modern job-seeking, said that she felt quite thwarted to see job listings where “ability to use social networking sites” was a job requirement. I can understand her flummoxedness (flummoxity? flummel?), but I found myself shaking my head to think of the pointy-headed bosses who somehow think this is the Next Big Thing and they’re going to score big if they can get X number of friends on their Facebook. Time to start learning Portuguese, fellas.

I did find one college friend I hadn’t heard from in six or seven years, but I was pretty sure I was going to see him there anyway. Honestly, I am pretty much in touch with anyone I want to be in touch with from high school or college, so I’m not likely to go seeking out long-lost childhood chums. Once the initial spurt of “friending” is done, I presume I’ll spend very little time with Facebook. I have plenty of other online distractions as it is.

Twitterpated

By Brian Filed in Misc Tagged with social networking, Twitter July 2nd, 2008 @ 2:47 pm

Out from under the thumb of corporate IT security for a bit, I decided to give Twitter a try, given the enormous amount of hype it gets in some online quarters. If you have somehow managed not to hear about or know about Twitter, the basic idea is that it lets you post short messages that can be seen by other people who choose to follow your messages, and vice versa. In other words, it’s sort of like the way email was way back when, using the social networking concept of “get all your friends to do this RIGHT NOW!”

So far, I’m not wildly excited by it. The service is plagued by its own success and is so overwhelmed by people sending messages that it just plain stops working for hours at a time. They just got some funding from Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and another hot VC firm, so hopefully they can upgrade their server farm to the point where it’s at least reliable. But the quality of the technical aspect of the service is nothing compared to the issue of the quality of the content. I’m following about 30 people at the moment. Several of them (maybe 5) are very earnest Twitterers. They send out messages all day and night, very often use the service as a way to solicit information or feedback from others, and clearly are thinking about how this particular widget can be useful. But most of the messages from most of the people never go much beyond “What I had for lunch” or “I wish I could take a nap”. And even I am guilty of not being able to think up anything much more interesting to say, even though I somehow manage to write all these long blog posts every day.

One one hand, it reminds me of the early days of blogging, when the basic styles were not quite as well defined and people used them much in the same manner to post short, quippy updates about what was going on with them. So many of those people left blogging behind a long time ago; if 9/11 didn’t get them, the 2004 election cycle did. I would guess that many, if not most, of the people who liked blogs for that chatty, social interaction have become ardent Twitterers. It suits the need to say something directly to a guaranteed audience of willing lookers-on and does not demand the same level of creativity and committment that blogging turned out to have.

The IM-like character of Twitter is not nearly as compelling. Personally, I have always disliked instant messaging for its intrusiveness — maybe I really don’t wan’t to have a slightly-asynchronous conversation with someone right this minute. Because most Twitter posts (“tweets”, they call them…ugh) are general statements that do not necessarily require a response from anyone, it’s easier to let them slide without feeling that you’re snubbing someone in the process. When somebody does specifically direct a remark at you, it’s more like email than instant messaging. You can reply when you’ve had a chance to think about it and write a response without thinking someone is waiting for an immediate reply.

I find myself slightly amused by the earnest ones, because they were the same people who believed that blogs/IM/SecondLife/whatever were going to revolutionize everything and always bring that same degree of credulity to whatever online experience they have. I am more encouraged to see people recognize it as less of “The Next Big Thing” and more of “a less annoying form of e-mail”. I am a fairly chatty fellow when you get me engaged in a conversation, and I like the idea of being able to fire a quick message out to a friend or a small group of friends. I don’t like the idea of using it like a pulpit with a microphone to issue edicts and beneficent missives to my many any loyal subjects and followers. But, then, I never cared for blogs (and bloggers) who saw themselves as prophets or demi-celebrities either.

I found myself nodding my head in agreement (as usual) as I read Les’s post about not quite getting social networking in general and Twitter in particular. He clearly falls into the “why do I care what you had for lunch” camp, and, seriously, this sort of trivial and ephemeral status update messaging is absolutely worthless. Of course, the corollary to that is that there are quite a few people in this world who are not capable of conversation any more compelling than “how’s the weather?” You’re just being made far more aware of them because they can share this vacuity with you via the Internet.

But I think that very situation lays bare the real worthlessness of all the social network sites that are so popular at the moment. It seems that they really only exist for people to build lists of friends and thus create the appearance that these people are really interconnecting, when they’re mostly just swapping virtual trading cards. The better ones find some particular utility that can meet some sort of need. For example, I think LinkedIn is a particularly good application of social networking because it directly ties in to the eternal need for business contacts. But the MySpace/Facebook genre seems particularly devoid of utility. Fine for goofing around when you are a high schooler or college student with plenty of time to devote to the fine art of mindless fucking off, but vastly limited otherwise. Like some of the “Web 1.0″ websites that seemed like they were sure things, I just can’t imagine there being any lingering value to these. Twitter, if it is lucky, has the potential to turn into a useful enough thing to become a must-have app on just about everyone’s desktop the way that IM did, but it’s probably not because anybody needs to know that I ate ramen noodles with chicken today.

I Got Yer Web 2.0 Right Here, Buddy

By Brian Filed in Amuse, Links Tagged with anti-social networking, BugrOff, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, social networking, Twitter September 18th, 2007 @ 11:18 am

MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Vox, LiveJournal, and more — if Web 1.0 was about stupid e-commerce sites, Web 2.0 is about stupid social networking sites. The only thing that separates social networking sites from more traditional Ponzi schemes is that the ~~suckers~~ members don’t have to pay any cash to get in…although, just like a pyramid con, you’re never going to get anything back, either.

If you’re tired of getting invited by every single person you ever met to join these sites, maybe you should consider signing up for the first ANTI-social networking site: BugrOff (that’s pronounced Bugger OFF!, just in case you weren’t sure)

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