Also, FWIW, while having children should, and almost always does, imply more reponsibilities; there's no required connection between the rest of the life events and behaviors you mentioned.
If you ever have children they will be better off for your boring traditional life - encouraged by your upper-middle class friends on facebook.
When you have kids your life changes so completely that you no longer have nearly as much in common with your friends that didn't. It is hard to imagine how social media could prevent this.
So maybe people block my updates because they are tired of seeing my kid, but I've probably blocked them because I got tired of reading about how Mitt Romney wants to ban tampons or whatever.
Also, "toeing" and "hijinks".
The order requires Facebook to obtain its users’ “affirmative express consent” before it can override their own privacy settings. For example, if a user designated certain content to be visible only to “friends,” Facebook could allow that content to be shared more broadly only after obtaining the user’s permission.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agree...;
I'm curious whether folks expect this settlement to keep the hijinks in line. Nothing particularly egregious seems to have happened to privacy settings since November 2011.
If you just consider the words, it has some different shades of meaning than "toeing the line," but the same general feeling. Instead of a pointless military drill ("toeing"), I like to conjure the image of a bunch of Egyptian slaves dragging stone blocks to build a pyramid ("towing").
Anyway, given the other solecisms out there, it will be a long road to hoe to stamp out "towing."
True. However, from what I have seen, most people don't even care what they were like before.
The majority of people are too concerned about their idiot kids and mortgages to contemplate and ponder about life, time, etc. Once you have kids and a mortgage, I doubt you will even care about backing up clayallsopp.com.
Don't take my word for it:
* the anti-war hippy generation. * the Ayn Rand crowd of the 60s/70s. * the Springsteen/anti-nuclear generation. * the Ron Paul generation.
They are all now (or will be) a bunch of yuppies worried about their retirement benefits. They have "better" things to do than to ponder about life, time, etc.
It's not about caring. It's not that we want to go back and relive the past. It's more about how you are ready to message someone and some older conversation from 2007 pops up. It's a weird nostalgic feeling about something you don't really care about much. But hey it's out there.
I've seen people do it, so I know there's a way.
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Alternatively, use the monospace font by putting two spaces before the text:
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3I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Zeitgeist right there. When "yuppie" was coined, it meant "young urban professional". Those people are now pushing 60.
I'm in my 40s, and I'm pretty much the same person I was in 2007. Same haircut, same career, and mostly the same friends.
"Youth is wasted on the young" - George Bernard Shaw
For some reason, this plan makes me (a 20-something) oddly happy. I hope you do it.
Hah. Okay, maybe that was an accidental joke.
I wonder what plans, if any, Facebook has to reach out to those kids in 10 years time when they are "old enough" (heh) to use Facebook.
Can you imagine having your entire life documented on some website? Pretty creepy in my opinion. I have to discourage my wife to upload images of our kids.
I think an infant has no expectation of privacy. Any decisions regarding a baby's on-line presence is limited to the parent's common sense.
Now that my son is in pre-school, we're dialing back on his on-line presence. Pictures on flickr and facebook are being re-categorized to "friends and family."
As he gets older, we're going to respect his wishes as to what should be made "public." If he doesn't want the story of the cute thing he did put up on facebook, we'll honor that request.
I'll also help him navigate being on-line. I know a pre-teen whose parents won't let him use a Minecraft public server (because of the risk of creepy douchebags), but a LAN server for him and his buddies is okay.
This is really funny out of context :)
Maybe it needs some kind of hate for your younger self to cut ties, cut hair, throw away old stuff and start a new life somewhere else, never looking back, while others reminisce.
Maybe Facebook doesn't feel new to me because I am old (born during the Eisenhower administration, just as the Space Age was beginning). To me, Facebook in 2012 seems much like AOL in 1998: a huge, dominant force in Internet interaction among the general public that is already doomed by fundamental flaws in its business plan. I'm old, and I have seen predictions come and go over the years, but this is my prediction about Facebook, and I'm sticking to it: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it."
Facebook makes it MORE apparent, if anything, than the earlier forms of online communication did how selectively people report details about their lives in online communities. I've known some good friends through online acquaintance, interspersed with real-world interaction, for twenty years. I'm well aware that the online picture of any person is incomplete, just as the knowledge of one person by any one acquaintance is incomplete. I think Facebook provides some convenience in keeping up with a varied group of Facebook "friends" including several of my first cousins, one of my children who has grown up and moved away from home (he was an early adopter of Facebook, and is now largely tired of it), former co-workers, classmates, current members of the same professional associations, and so on. It's a lot of fun to see friends from different phases of my life interact and learn from one another. I've managed to make my Facebook wall be like a targeted Hacker News: a place where I can find thoughtful discussion of links I discover while Web-browsing. To me, that's something well worth growing old with.
The article includes the paragraph: "You can message someone you haven't spoken with in years, and yet it visually flows right under some unimaginably unrelated conversation from 2007. And when you realize that exact numerical gap between the years, it stings a little. Reading how you've changed, how they've changed, and thinking about everything that didn't happen in-between." That is the most startling default setting of the Facebook messaging system. My email inbox, which is sorted strictly by date order, obscures the gaps in communication I have with some correspondents. (Cleaning out my drafts folder from time to time discloses those gaps.) But real-world analogies of this are receiving Christmas cards after a gap of a few years in correspondence, and the like. The strength of communication in each relationship ebbs and flows, or so I have observed for more than five decades now.
With the Nov. 2011 edgerank changes, ie forced "close friend" newsfeed, the one magical thing about FB, which I call digital osmosis -- ie keeping up with people without interaction -- has gone the way of the dodo.
I'm planning my escape: Valentines Day 2013 I'm closing my account. Working on a toolset to host my own timeline, on my own server. May keep a fake account to access a site here or there and keep up with a few vague acquaintances, but will stop posting and handing my data over to FB.
FWIW, I find many high quality conversations on Google+ these days since they've launched their communities (e/g/ big data community, DDD).
Now get off my astroturf ;-)
I think that - as often with the digital/Internet thing - it is not qualitatively new having documents of yourself, but the huge increase in the quantity of this information and the way it lives outside your control. Same way that mix tapes in the two tape drive days were copyright violation, but had a considerable time and effort barrier so not too many got made and they had limited distribution. Digital copying is low effort, and broadcasting trivial. Hence problems...
PS: I'm 54 and think about Life, Time &c quite often.
This is a very interesting book that explains a lot of historical context for how the digital age differs from what came before. The linked blog post highlights the temporal aspect of digital memory - that a post from a day ago is as easily accessible as one from ten years ago.
Perhaps even more important is that because we limit what we post, context gets completely removed. So many people carefully curate their identity that the image we see of a person is not only an image from N years ago, but is also only what N years ago's version of one's self chose to publish to the web.
We definitely live in interesting times, I would encourage anyone that thinks on this phenomenon to check out the book.
I don't know what difference that will make compared to analogue Kodak moments, but it's very interesting to think about.
Mostly, I'm happy that my childhood photos won't come with horribly-spelt comments. :)
A typical person who mistook those photos to reflect how peoples' lives actually are, and not rare moments out of years, would become envious and miserable.
As with the 1950s, which were nothing like what TV portrays the era as being, I worry that future generations will see these 2012-era photos and ask if our lives really were this glamorous, with average people constantly taking vacations. Well, no. That was not reality.