06-12-2011, 06:27 AM
There's a simple solution of course -- stop giving them all that content and they will collapse. Impossible? Yes, of course, there are too many people in the world who so desperately need to be seen by all their friends, even if said friends are only cyber-representations of half-people who couldn't make a friend in the real world and who would crumple into a heap if ever they said something that didn't get a "like" from someone.
I was having dinner at the pub the other night when I spotted a poster on the wall saying "find us on Facebook" -- and I thought, I'm sitting here in your bloody pub, I've already found you, what on earth could possibly make me want to be "friends" with a pub? I mean obviously I'm not going to piss the pub off, that would be counterproductive, but do I really need access to it via social networking when I have access to it via REAL social networking?
Facebook has set itself up as the "must have", first point of connection for people. When I first joined I went looking for school friends I'd lost touch with, found a stack, then realised that the reason I'd lost touch with them was because really I just wasn't interested in the crap they had to say. I used to post poems and essays on Facebook, then found them cropping up unacknowledged on pages of people who I can only assume were "friends of friends" or "friends of friends of friends" or somewhere down the track of 64 degrees of separation, which really pissed me off. Now, nothing goes on there that is of use to anyone else -- not because I'm precious about ownership (I certainly don't make any money out of it) but because I can't see why I should create something that then makes someone else's page more interesting than they could possibly make it themselves, given their pathetic and uninspiringly sad little existence.
Although now I'm tempted to find out if, along with face recognition technology, it also has arse recognition technology.
I was having dinner at the pub the other night when I spotted a poster on the wall saying "find us on Facebook" -- and I thought, I'm sitting here in your bloody pub, I've already found you, what on earth could possibly make me want to be "friends" with a pub? I mean obviously I'm not going to piss the pub off, that would be counterproductive, but do I really need access to it via social networking when I have access to it via REAL social networking?
Facebook has set itself up as the "must have", first point of connection for people. When I first joined I went looking for school friends I'd lost touch with, found a stack, then realised that the reason I'd lost touch with them was because really I just wasn't interested in the crap they had to say. I used to post poems and essays on Facebook, then found them cropping up unacknowledged on pages of people who I can only assume were "friends of friends" or "friends of friends of friends" or somewhere down the track of 64 degrees of separation, which really pissed me off. Now, nothing goes on there that is of use to anyone else -- not because I'm precious about ownership (I certainly don't make any money out of it) but because I can't see why I should create something that then makes someone else's page more interesting than they could possibly make it themselves, given their pathetic and uninspiringly sad little existence.
Although now I'm tempted to find out if, along with face recognition technology, it also has arse recognition technology.
It could be worse