Another major step I took was to stop posting. That way I had no expectations of feedback and logged in far less in general.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
Reading the feed was like playing slots. It pays out just enough to keep you playing, but on net you're still losing. "Maybe that next post will be interesting! Oh, nope, just another story about Donald Trump. On to the next post..." Never again.
The Purge: What happens when you unfollow everyone on the Internet? https://medium.com/@helena/the-purge-what-happens-when-you-u...
We are so unprepared to deal with all this shit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/07/us/colorado-students-caugh...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/opinion/from-army-of-one-t...
More than ad-blocking its a good write up on how the attention economy is just wasting everyone's time. http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-b...
Or, like, what if the reality is that taking a picture of your own nude body is not actually a crime? What if images of human nudity simply weren't criminalized?
A bridge too far?
That probably wouldn't have helped. I doubt they were taking the pictures at school.
> Or maybe not letting kids use any form of digital camera, at all, ever? Is that actually impossible?
At this point, probably. You certainly would destroy your child's social life.
The bigger problem is parents not knowing what the hell their kids are doing. This is rather simple: "Yes, I'm going to have all of your passwords and occasionally I'm randomly going to take your phone to check every single app on your phone and computer. And you will unlock them, or you are grounded and won't have a phone. Ever. No, you don't get a choice in this. If you don't want me seeing it you probably shouldn't be doing it."
We have always been unprepared to deal with this shit. The social stuff making it exponential means we just can't ignore it anymore.
Very few people have excellent memories of high school even before ubiquitous social apps.
I also love the investigating "whether children were bullied into participating". Um, duh. But most of it was social coercion with a side of physical threat rather than actual violence, so nobody will be prosecuted.
High school is prison, but without its benefits.
This is an interesting section, and I think it holds true for a lot of people even if your initial response is "no one's forcing you to be connected".
I personally can't wait to graduate from college so I can delete my Facebook (for some reason a lot of college-related things require it). It's not a real blank slate at all, but it's better than nothing.
Well, from my experience, that is simply not true.
I held out until December of 2014 before joining Facebook. Before then I found (and still find) the interface horrible (being much more happy in my RSS reader and mail client) and was squeamish regarding the privacy, as Germans like me tend to be.
I noticed, though, that it was becoming harder and harder to contact people outside of the professional realm. Often they would not check their email accounts for weeks or not even give out an email address to anybody.
The moment to give up came when I noticed that even using Doodle to schedule an event did not work as good as it used to since some people seemingly migrated off of email in their private lives.
Did it a while ago on Facebook, and although I've re-added a good 75% of people on the new profile because I still like to socialise with them, having a few weeks break in between was quite pleasant.
That way, the tracking via the ubiquitous buttons doesn't work and the barrier for "just checking Facebook" is higher.
No need to do that, they only work for a couple of days even if you try to get them work.
Based on the studies the author cites, the title of this article should be "Facebook is bad for you". But what about other social networks that don't focus on exploiting their users and manipulating them to addictive activity? (Dreamwidth is one that leaps to mind.) I'd bet dollars to donuts that the dynamics are very different in those environments.
- Twitter is generally a way for people to follow famous/semi-famous people nowadays. Most people don't go there for their friends. If they follow someone, it's because they WANT to see what they have to see. There is little pressure to 'follow' someone back, like there is with Facebook friends.
- Reddit is semi-anonymous. The running joke is that you never want anyone in real life to know your reddit username. It's all about sharing, but it does not have the same kind of "dredge up the past" issue.
- HN falls in with Reddit. I know few people who use HN, and those that do I don't communicate with on it. Hell, most people don't even pay attention to usernames unless it's someone well known like tptacek.
You can delete most of the content, and in theory, for 3rd party, it's pretty problematic to dig up. ( Unless you're a government agency, but that was always the case, wasn't it? ). You can even opt-out of archive.org.
IPFS would be a very different scenario, and that is one of the reasons I hesitate to join.
There is also that Google don't really care about this - they'll ruin your livelihood by dredging up your past mistakes for a couple of cents of ad revenue. That sort of power needs to be curbed.
I use twitter regularly, but it's mostly to keep track of my interests rather than social connections.
I am going to Chile in a months time. I was there 15 years ago. I have a couple of contacts on facebook (I think I started using it around 8 or 9 years ago) that I will meet up with, but there are more who I would like to catch up with, but I have litterally lost touch with them.
I still talk to all the people I wanted to talk to when I had a facebook.
Obviously not for everyone, but I enjoy it.
Here is an excerpt from a blog post called "Slaves to the Feed - This is not the realtime we've been looking for" I wrote some years ago:
"Let’s start with what most people probably can agree. Information is accumulating online. The amount of available information is increasing at an exponential rate, some say it doubles every second year. This mean that any illusion of being able to stay up to date with everything that is going on is utopian and has been probably since Guttenberg invented the press.
Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.
There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.
This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.
Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.
It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.
It might be an obsession, but I think it’s an obsession that many critics will find themselves having to submit to sooner or later. ..."
http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
