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0 pointsmdm_14y ago0 comments

Hi. Long-time lurker here; I just created an HN account to reply to you. Your post expresses some of the things I've been feeling about social media that I haven't been able to express very well myself (I had to look up "Maslow pyramid"). The sort of unease and nausea, the whole thing just feels somehow creepy and wrong.

I deactivated my Facebook account long ago because of this feeling. I think what it boils down to is that I don't think I should know so much stuff about my friends, family, co-workers, etc without having obtained that knowledge by directly interacting with them in meaningful ways over long periods of time. The Facebook model appears to let me know people better, but it's in a shallow, passive way and encourages me to conceptualize people as caricatures, assembled from a handful of their most obvious or outstanding personality traits. I realize this stuff has been around for a long time, but FB turbo-charges it, and I feel like it's an extremely poor way to "know" people.

The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.

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unimpressive14y ago· 1 in thread

>The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.

Your certainly not the first person to point this out. [0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28novel%29

jasomill14y ago

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

(Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle[1], 1854)

[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_Without_Principle

benblodgett14y ago

I agree that your points do apply to the majority of facebook users. However, I think fb can be very useful as a social messaging/event calendar if applied properly. Without sacrificing the importance of direct social interaction.

To me it makes me wonder if the application or the popular belief of usage is the problem.

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