Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Poll: People aren’t logging on to Facebook anymore.
The Facebook craze that gave us Farmville and notes from “friends” about their breakfast and just about everything else may finally be ending.
A new Pew Research Center poll finds that a huge group of users, 61 percent, are taking breaks from Facebook up to “several weeks” long, and that virtually all age groups are decreasing their time on the social media site that recently flopped in its initial public offering of publicly traded stock. Most devastating: 38 percent of users aged 18-29, the focus of advertisers on the site, plan to slash their time on Facebook this year.
Farmville…pffft. So long.
I still find Facebook useful as a way to communicate to the “everyday” people whose politics don’t necessarily line up with mine. In this day & age, “how in the [expletive] could you possibly have voted for Barack Obama” is not quite so much an outburst of exasperation, as a sincere question that demands some quality answering, toot-sweet. I can’t get that from my blog. Blog readership tends to follow the ideological meanderings of its author. And my readers are mostly too smart to ever support Obama. It ends up being a preach-to-the-choir thing.
But, I have noticed over time, Facebook following also begins to follow the ideological meanderings of the subscriber, thus defeating the purpose. Liberals delight in shunning me, as quickly and as forcefully as possible. I’ve also noticed this is something they tend to be very practiced at doing in all walks of life. Low-information centrists, for the most part, have learned their lesson, and I think the centrists not included in that were never really centrists. This week I got my first chiding from Facebook that I had to review the community guidelines because I’d been reported as submitting a friend request to someone I don’t know. This is not something that could happen on a regular basis, since I don’t do that; I think there were a couple times lately I pushed the button, purely in the spirit of “a friend of [blank] is a friend of mine.” And, in likelihood, those two were libs and I was trying to heal a rift. They saw an opportunity. Okay, lesson learned, it’s not my place to try to heal the polarization, I should learn to embrace it and celebrate it like they do.
But the weird screwy “abusing the friend request button” algorithm is a major turn-off. What conservative wants to log in to a social network, so that liberals can continue to frolic in and enforce their pretend-reality-bubble of “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is creepy”? Not good for us, not good for them, not good for anybody else. If we felt some compulsion to continue to do things that aren’t good for anybody, we’d probably be liberals in the first place, right? And, I suppose if they had what it takes to opt in to “friendships” with people who don’t march in lockstep with them on every little thing, they wouldn’t be.
As a way to establish and maintain an identifiable on-line presence, I think Facebook is probably around for the long haul. I think there is research on this that says so. Facebook seems lately to have read that research, and come to a decision that it wants to move in on LinkedIn‘s turf by offering people a work identity. This, I believe, is a mistake of enormous proportions. I’m basing that on a presumption that people use these tools the way I do, and that’s always problematic I realize. But I don’t want current work contacts to see me on Facebook. Maybe past co-workers, the ones who are kinda “cool.” But there is no reason to go mixing up these two worlds, and if I’m going to be pushed into it because that’s just the way the system expects me to use its services, then I’ll be on my way out too. That’s probably what’s been happening, since most Facebook inhabitants behave more-or-less the way I do.
Besides, I’m getting rather fatigued with networks and systems and applications demanding that I should use them a certain way. It’s like any other form of pollution, I suppose, each polluter thinks his pollution isn’t quite as bad as the next guy’s, and he isn’t really contributing to the problem. But the totality of it is a problem, and subscribers will opt out of things to keep that total under control. Twice a month, if not more, I’m asked to upgrade my Flash support for videos and I have to wonder: Isn’t this technology pretty well settled? What are you doing, adding support for more codecs or something? If that’s the case then maybe your architecture needs re-visiting. You use a thing for a certain purpose, if the purpose doesn’t change then why is it that you have to keep tinkering with the thing just because you’re told to?
Dunno, maybe there’s something in the details that will confound this idea-progression I’m having. I’ll stay away from discussing what I don’t understand. But there’s been some resentment brewing about Facebook for a few years now, and I can’t say I’m completely surprised to see something might come of it. If it happens, I think “Timeline” might be recalled by history as the jump-the-shark point, the beginning of the end.
Hat tip to Instapundit.
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I use Facebook to keep up in a minor way with old friends and especially extended family. It’s also my way of posting my full name, including maiden name, and current contact information, so anyone trying to find me from the old days shouldn’t have much trouble. It probably results in spam, but I don’t mind.
I almost always keep it strictly nonpolitical: here’s a picture of my dog, this is a restaurant I liked. Now and then an old college acquaintance will post something particularly incendiary — not just a view I disagree with, but a childish assertion that anyone who disagrees must be a stupid misogynistic devil-worshipper — and I’ll politely inform him that I disagree. That’s just a way of keeping blowhards a little more honest, I think. The nuanced response I usually get is something like, “There you go, repeating whatever your right-wing masters tell you to say.” But this moron is a pretty good friend of pretty good friends, and I don’t particularly want to get into a flame war with him or tell him my opinion of him, so I let it go. I figure he’s exposing himself well enough.
I use LinkedIn, in a minor way, for professional contacts. It helps me follow people who’ve changed jobs more than once since we worked together.
- Texan99 | 02/18/2013 @ 09:50The Linkedin thing really does sound like a mistake. I’ve used it, in a very minor way. More importantly, I’ve seen the hiring process at close range, for entry-level jobs. Our wonderfully liberal college kids are going to be shocked to find that nobody in the HR department gives a wet fart in a rainstorm about their politics. In a service-sector job, in fact, hyperventilating about causes is a real disadvantage, since there are 250 applicants for every 1 open position…. when everybody’s “resume” consists of a 4.0, a “___ Studies” degree, and a summer internship at a nonprofit, the only thing that distinguishes you from the other 249 aspirants is that you know how to shut up and get along with your coworkers.
As a standalone app, though, Facebook should be fine. It’s an automated narcissism enabler. You can easily construct a whole world, inhabited by thousands, where your every repost of a lame Stephen Colbert gag about eeeeevil Republicans gets dozens of “you go girls!” You get to feel like you’re really accomplishing something without doing anything….
I think a wise man once said something about that:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Or you could just call it Item Eight.
- Severian | 02/18/2013 @ 10:14[…] As the kids say, +1 for this: […]
- dustbury.com » Some friend you are | 02/20/2013 @ 12:10