ken yap wrote:
> I’m satisfied with my level of control.
me too…
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]
Me three.
zehnzeichen
Where I am, I rarely see billboards. I’m on the DoNotCall registry, and only get hit by calls around election time, save for an occasional marketing poll. The technology behind Web 2.0 in general is driven by data mining and advertising, with some eye candy to make it palatable. Don’t even get me started on gmail/Google.
Just wondering, what would be the point in a FaceBook account with fake information? I thought the main idea was contacting friends, wouldn’t a fake name work against this?
chief sealth wrote:
> I thought the main idea was contacting friends, wouldn’t a
> fake name work against this?
not at all…when one finds a friend that one sends a “friend request”
asking if s/he wants to be friends, AND it allows a note to go along,
so they seem ID (fake name, say) and then in the note i say who i
really am…no problem…
well, there is because i have folks in my “friends list” that i don’t
remember who they are for sure, because so many use non-real
names…(not the dumbest of the dumb)
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]
Mm… i need to clarify something.
I do get the benefit of such sites like facebook for, lets say, action groups or other topics.
Thing is that i seem to have friends who are not active themself on facebook and so my wall, their wall is not filled with action.
Then i have other friends who are much younger and write much stuff i don’t even want to know. Thats because they write about things that matters to them. Last nights party etc…
I guess you have to make peace or quit.
I think, to take on an idea proposed by someone (sorry forgot name) to just subscribe to your own wall and just log in when you feel like.
btw. i never got into the habit of checking every day. That was in the first week, since it was so new.
Twitter is totally different. I have an account but i don’t follow anyone.
Information gets so overwhelming these days, that your head is close to blow because of over information. No time to process everything that comes in.
This is one forum i visit pretty much every day.
I live in Los Angeles (there you go data miner) and information here is on every corner. Myself, i am tired of busy cities. If i had money, i would move to a quieter neighbor hood.
So right now i am still have not decided what to do, but i appreciate the opinions. I very much enjoy reading them all.
My name was real, my birthday fake, and there is no other information there that isn’t public already. I found my friend through their picture. Others found me through friend of friend, etc.
Agreed!
I could rant for hours about this, but I’ll try to keep it brief.
First of all, I’ve been a prolific Facebook user. For a while, I really got into it and used it as a tool for socializing. Overall, though, it was a big disaster, because the people I really wanted to get to know, I didn’t get to know (or at least not via FB), and the people I DIDN’T really want to get to know had that much more access to me and my personal life as a consequence of me being on the network. No good! Shallow and manipulative people absolutely LOVE Facebook, because they can play all kinds of mind games that way. I guess I did my share of that too but only in good fun, and at the end of the day, I was not having it, so I deactivated and then finally deleted my account.
(They didn’t make it easy, either! It was only after the Canadian government threatened legal action against Facebook that I was ever presented with a full-fledged “DELETE” option. By now, the rules might have changed again, as one other person here pointed out, so that anything you upload to them now may very well belong to them forever, whether or not you keep your account. AFAIC, that’s just evil!!!)
One person here said that Facebook is just a networking tool. Well, yes and no. Of course, it is what it is. But, nowadays, with things so interconnected, tools like this can lead to major problems very quickly. It’s not the tool so much as how it’s being used, and the overall trends it contributes to. By that criteria, I think Facebook is absolutely poisonous to our society. People get addicted to it very fast. They start to mistake it for real interaction. Then before long, a hundred other annoying little social trends have popped up that are purely a product of that addiction… such as people snapping pictures at every party they go to, just so they can upload them to FB afterward.
Isn’t it interesting that, when you want to do any kind of major land development that requires major zoning or construction, you have to do environmental impact assessments, to make sure the area isn’t adversely affected… but we as a species will allow any number of new things to infiltrate our minds without doing any kind of psychological impact assessments first?
What really bugs me is how much women have taken to all of this. Naturally, they’re within their rights to do whatever they want, but I just think it’s sad. When I see girls out in public, busy texting away on their cell phones, oblivious to what’s going on around them, it breaks my heart. There’s nothing sexy about that. It’s understandable for boys to be hypnotized by their toys, because boys are natural problem-solvers who are easily fascinated by things they can see and touch. Why women, though?
One more thing: most of us here, I’m sure, are more than familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation and its various follow-ups. How are any of us missing the parallels between what’s happening right now with social networks, and the Borg? They’re exactly the same thing. “The Borg are just characters in a show,” you say. Yes, of course, but they’re based on the very real fears that people have of technology taking away their freedom. How is what’s happening right now any different?
That’s enough ranting for now. For the record, I hope all of you know that I’d rather be carrying this conversation in person. 
While I think people getting that immersed in FB is inane, you really have to look at human psychology to understand why the take up of these social technologies. Suppose I told you that you couldn’t get into your car and go across town to meet your friend, or use the telephone to call them up, i.e. go back to the 19th century. Would you put up with that? That’s probably the reaction you will get from these FBers if you said, why don’t you email friends.
Now I think it’s silly to want to be that connected all the time, I think there are good reasons for solitude some of the time, but I hope you understand what’s driving it. If FB didn’t exist, it would have to be invented, to borrow the phrase.
P.S. In terms of concrete action, well, if we can convince the OP to delete his account, that will be one positive step.
Aside from that, I’ll start compiling evidence of the negative psychological and social impacts of FB and other social networking sites, with an eye toward posting it online in the future. Maybe someone else is already on this? Is there a Coalition for Non-Technically-Enhanced Socializing? 
I’m not sure who you were replying to, but I’ll address what you said.
Of course, people are going to use the tool if it’s there. But if technology creates a situation in which our own psychology begins to work against us, then I think we have to step back and reassess. Getting into my car to drive across town to visit a friend doesn’t impair my ability to visit with my friend or to make new friends down the road. Arguably, though, Facebook does undermine our ability to socialize, long term. I’ve definitely heard of studies where they said that people have more contacts now, thanks to social networking, but fewer close friends (BFF’s). So what does that say? Where is all of this headed? And are we comfortable rolling the dice?
I’m not comfortable with it one bit. I think it’s turning us into the Borg… but the problem isn’t Facebook, it’s human nature, so how do you stop it? Do you try to take away the tool, or just warn people against using it? If you choose the latter, how do you make an argument compelling enough for them to listen?
I think it’s the loss of a personal space that’s being accelerated by these technologies that should be attended to. F2F socialising isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. I have encountered my share of bores and no doubt I’ve bored people to tears too. There are some friends I talk to for tens of minutes on free mobile to mobile time so I wouldn’t want to give that up.
And on the other hand technology brings us e-books too, so maybe that should be encouraged.
So the issue of how to socialise effectively is much broader than a knee jerk reaction of delete FB/Twitter/email/mobile whatever.
Facebook explained it once like this.
You, the user, expose yourself to everyone on the web for everyone to see. Your datas and profile is your identity which defines you. Thats why everyone has to use the real name instead of silly names.
Thing is, on one hand its great since you find people you haven’t heart in a long time. I never got bugged by anyone i did not know. Perhaps i am somewhat uninteresting to others.
I keep a low profile really.
The one thing i like is to connect to organizations for, let say, political things. Its a great tool for connecting people to causes.
I don’t even think that they erase any data ones you leave. It just deactivating. That can mean a lot.
That’s true, there was a fuss awhile back about that. They had made a change in their terms of service stating that they can use your data even if you deactivate.
That maybe just so they don’t have to spend time cleaning out accounts and Facebook isn’t the only site with that policy.
I’ve got my facebook account, but I definitely don’t check it every day (let alone every hour!).
I started off for keeping in touch with a few friends from college, but once I got on I was friended by a guy I haven’t seen since High School… Next thing I know a good portion of my HS class was there in their different place in life (and place around the globe!). We ended up planning for our 20 year reunion over Facebook which had a good turnout (of course there were requests to contact anybody not on facebook to inform them too).
I even got contacted by somebody my brother knew, asking how he was. So I, after checking with him, passed his email along.
I even got contacted by my ex-girlfriend (she saw a mutual friend comment on my status or something) which I didn’t add as a friend. Nothing against her, I am just not interested in keeping tabs with her.
I do, though, try to keep it to people I actually know (friends, family, know them from school, etc.). If I don’t know the person, I Ignore them.
You don’t need facebook. All you need is a friend who forwards email to all their other friends without cleaning it up. They, in turn, forward it to all their friends, and so on. If you need to become part of this, let me know. I can include your email address in just one of my messages. You’ll be all over the world in a matter of days! lol!
Actually, I have had some people contact me this way. People I thought were long gone. I have also had contact from some I wish were long gone. Oh, well. The benefits of the new information age!
Bart
I just got contacted with a friend who has just kinda disappeared years ago! Everybody kinda lost contact with him and now that he is in Facebook he’s reconnecting (and I helped 
)with the 'ol gang! I think it’s been over 10 years since I’ve last seen him.