I joined FB basically on a panhandling mission to see whether some pore crippled people ah know can fundraise effectively for their charity computer lab via FB. We are still in the phase of poke around and kick the tires and test accessibility, and in the process of poking around I have made a few observations:
--I get an astounding amount of dribble about what friends of my friends are doing. I find myself wondering how humanity managed to survive all those long millenia without that level of drivel.
--I suppose the marketeers are ecstatic that about every 100 comments or so, I find something I want to join or become a fan of. --I think there are lots of things that probably just get me bounced out of many marketers' target pools. I could be GLAD of that but then I go an dbecome a fan of mathematics, the Swedish chef, and some translation resource or other. Mess with their minds I say, even if there is less privacy than when I used to go anonymously read the whole spectrum of political monthlies sometimes in the library.
--While I was fishing around looking around a coupld college classmates' pages, I found profiles that are almost certainly my friends' teenage kids. Considering all the freaks on the internet, I wonder that my friends do not block the display their kids profiles to anyone but people who they already know or have at least one friend in common with. I imagine my friends have kids who are pretty sophisticated, but I still found myself wondering. Now back to that vast social networking wasteland.
DC
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Billy O'Connor <billyoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Feb 2009 23:54:11 -0500
> WD <mister.wd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:09 PM, Billy O'Connor <billyoc at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > I only joined Facebook at the urging of some union activists who were
> investigating the use of social networking websites to coordinate union
> activities. Now all of my relatives are on Facebook, though, so I'm stuck
> there.
> >
> >
> > Sounds like you're in the same boat I'm in. So now, as far as
> > Facebook is concerned, your relatives are all hanging out in the same
> > public square your friends and co-workers are -- and anything you do
> > with your actual friends now is at least potentially knowable to your
> > family and co-workers. Not good.
> >
> > Those cheesy metaphors about the Internet being like a village, etc.
> > are really true with respect to Facebook -- especially in the sense
> > that everyone in your life knows your business and you know everyone
> > else's. I wonder if Facebook will promote conformity in the same way
> > village life did.
>
> It's become quite a strange environment for me. For the first time in 25
> years, I find myself editing my speech to cater to the lowest common
> denominator, which in this case is my little nieces and nephews! I'm going
> to stick to Unionbook, and just use Facebook to talk to my family, I guess.
> :)
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