I hate Facebook
I thought it was great initially, a way of connecting with people i'd lost contact with, a way of feeling in contact with friends overseas. She poked me, so she thought of me, even if just for an instant. And then it grew, and grew, and grew.
It turned out that if I'd wanted to maintain contact, I would have. If I wanted to regain contact with someone, I'd defintely use Facebook, initially. It's great for organising school reunions. But commenting on someone's facebook post is not all that rewarding.
If I'm looking at people's posts on facebook, it's because I feel a bit lonely, and I want to feel some frisson of social contact. Seeing the proof of my friend's independent inner lives, even on facebook, is good. I can believe in my friends, believe in the world, and get my head to shrink down to normal size.
There was a Star Trek TNG episode, a quite stupid one, about Beverley Crusher being trapped inside her own head, and her friends ceasing to exist. Some quantum thing, sure.... But the basic notion is right-- my imagination can't contain you. Facebook gives a channel to let you in. A thin, kind of nasty channel, but a channel nonetheless. It would be good if my friends had blogs, or wrote long emails, but they don't. So facebook is all I have.
Facebook makes it easy to not have a blog, to not upload photos, to not write long emails. It's the Xmas letter form of contact; occasional status posts, blasted out to hundreds of people. Not personal.
Facebook controls all that stuff, of course, though perhaps the details change. AFAIK, facebook can do whatever it wants, make your posts visible outside, or not, make old ones dissappear, or not, keep them around after you've deleted your account, or have died. It's their house, you just play in it.
If I have anything to say of any significance, I want my own house to say it in. I want control over it.
Blogs and feeds are brilliant for this. Thanks to @davewiner there are great meechanisms for tracking what you want to track, ordering it and reviewing it the way you want. Of course, you can't do that with stuff on facebook. Facebook decides what to show you.
Journals are giving up their online presence for a presence in facebook. People are publishing links to facebook in the form of like buttons. I hate like buttons. If you care about something enough, write about it, tweet about it, in a way i can find out on the real internet. In a way that lasts. In a way that doesn't mix your like with thousands of others I don't care about.
Google's circles seems better this way. If you trust google more than facebook. Which I don't, really.
Sure it's nice to see what the mass of people are thinking, if you're marketing a product. I'm not.
Inauthenticity. Likes mean you clicked a button. if you've only clicked that button once, is your like worth more than someone who clicks it a hundred times every day? No.
I worry that people are throwing away the free printing press they control, for the free one they don't control, but that everyone else is using.
Back before the Internet, there was the Source, and CompuServe, and later, AOL. AOL had lot of people, companies had a presence on AOL. It was a classic walled garden, until they attached it to the internet. AOL users considered harmful. Now it seems that everyone is flocking back into the garden. Seeing the rush, companies are too. Probably some are Facebook only.
It's just too depressing.
Tags: internet
