iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

Last year there was a death in the family and a cousin put up a fb memorial page, my mother who has never been online was relaying it to me she said "They have put a memorial on that e-bay, they don't print them in the paper any more ".

From what I have seen of fb I will probably never go on it, there are too many people from my past who I would cross the road to avoid and it looks like a stalker app.

A psychopath I went to school with used fb to groom victims, he was pretending to be a recovering alcoholic to garner sympathy and hooked in this poor lass into some horror relationship that ended in her being hospitalised. The same (middle aged) guy tried to chat up my 12 year old niece on fb, I was really pissed when my sis wouldn't get the police involved.

Last year there was a death in the family and a cousin put up a fb memorial page, my mother who has never been online was relaying it to me she said "They have put a memorial on that e-bay, they don't print them in the paper any more ".

<3 this so much. my mother persistently thinks lol means lots of love so i got a text from her saying, 'dad started chemo today lol'

dying

i think one thing about facebook - at least i never see it - is that ppl in no way for whatever reason take it as a place where they can talk about 'what facebook is about'. like it's this weird combination of being completely out of their control, because of course lol the facebook corp making everything happen and owning everything, but also completely in their control, because it's all from the perspective of you and your feed and your posts and your pictures and your likes. people get in eruptive little skirmishes about people's content flooding them, or more pertinently, people commenting up some bullshit on their own posts, but that doesn't lead to disputes about the meaning of the medium - just defriending, unfollowing, etc.

whereas at least on twitter there's all kinds of convos about ~what it means~ that they're tweeting. (as on ilx)

points to a pernicious side effect of so much of the internet being mediated thru facebook (trending links etc) now

twitter users are constantly stuck on ~what everything means~ when I'm in charge they'll be mass culled

imo what Facebook has declined a lot from just a place to kick it virtually with your friends to everybody posting dogshit links for lols and BIG IMPORTANT MESSAGES, which of course, can easily be boiled down to a GIF.

But Facebook largely helped me become more sociable - due to the event postings, yes, but also had a few relationships start there. with people I already knew, mind you, but it gave me more of a window to communicate with them (no longer had to fill up my personal email box!).

there have also been occasions I've made friends on FB and then wound up meeting them irl not long after, and a few times rekindled old high school friendships or given me the ability to hang out with friends from junior high who are still in town (which happened once!). Not that I'm in the habit of looking backwards, I barely hang out with people that I knew pre-age 25, but y'know...not deleting my account anytime soon, just not reading as much.

yeah i'd gladly not talk to the wall anymore but the event postings seem to be essential if you want to know what's going on at nonstandard venues

<3 this so much. my mother persistently thinks lol means lots of love so i got a text from her saying, 'dad started chemo today lol'

― estela, Monday, February 23, 2015 2:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dying

― flopson, Monday, February 23, 2015 2:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...

I have slowly unfollowed everyone and facebook is now a bonobos or shave box sponsored self-maintaining birthday calendar, which is actually very useful.

still in denial over fb. I miss usenet.

>on February 24, 2015
>ogmor said:
>still in denial over fb. I miss usenet.

Word

despite the deluge of opinions & the decline of ~websites~ & anonymity, overall I think the internet is probably better than it was. the gulf in quantity between now and 2000 is huge

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

tildes ruined the internet

where is your website i want to sign the guestbook

oh that's right. it is on the ~cloud~.

did you ever see this site ogmor

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

― ogmor, Monday, February 23, 2015 7:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is OTM, maybe more for the "do you miss the 'old' internet" thread but I agree, the idea of really poking through some website you find, where the person's hierarchy of information is really weirdly weighted and lopsided and some sections have one article in them and others have forty subsections with amazing chewy stuff buried deep, this is really gone. there's not much that's exploratory about the web, you just receive stuff. goes hand in hand with nobody having personal websites at all (or even the personalization of myspace pages) or more to the point - - - when was the last time you actually read somebody's facebook "profile"? in the sense of the part where you have your favorite quotes or whatever... what would have been the core not only of a "website" but of a social network page in the friendster/myspace era.

i guess that still exists as a meaningful thing in okcupid pages and such. but it's the one "slow" thing about the whole site, in that it has this longer existence, less ephemeral, you actually exist as a being rather than one of countless cloud-entities cropping up here or there in this comment thread or that re-share. and this is completely buried: you have to go to "about" and then "details about you." everything else just gets washed away immediately. i dislike this about facebook, but i'm not sure how much is also just resentment at the loss, long ago, of all the stuff i had on friendster and myspace. so many emails that just don't exist anymore at all. it's a bummer. my facebook profile i haven't updated since 2009 by the looks of it.

not exactly facebook's fault, but imo the web is a better (for users) platform for . . . content . . . than aol/facebook/snapchat/apps/etc and it kinda seems like fb led the way back into the walled gardens of aol

http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/the-next-internet-is-tv

that said, i only go on facebook when i'm horribly drunk and have exhausted other avenues of intertainment, which is rare. i'd delete my account, but there's an off-chance that someone will invite me to something on it despite my persistent failure to attend previous events

well ya never know

tbf, my inability to leave the house is not facebook's fault

xp nakh-
no, but I am charmed by it, the borgean index especially. the cheerful aphorism-laced mish mash reminds me of early internet days in a few ways bc it also reminds me of my childhood home, chatting to my dad & skimming my parents books. not sure if the peculiar crossover between weightier scholarly subject matter and lighter internet-facilitated browsing goes wider than my own experience but it is a way of thinking + feeling that I hadn't thought about for a long time

I do miss the ideal of surfing the web tho, the notion of individual curiosity & wanderlust without algorithmic mediation. all the big social sites have stripped away idiosyncratic structure and design & replaced it with content in homogeneous form

i feel you on this but there's something i've always wondered like... i get the demand side, why all most people want out of the internet is the homogenized big social media version and how that ends up being most of what we see, but what's up with the supply side? where did all the people creating idiosyncratic content go? are they still out there and no one is reading?

i mean i guess 1 answer is i'm making a huge oversimplifying assumption by calling the internet in 2015 homogenized

lots of people are making idiosyncratic content within the given social media ie being youtube millionaires or whatever

It had always sucked. But then our parents got on it. Doomed.

idiosyncratic content is different from idiosyncratic structure tho.

I think there is a heaviness to the internet now, the constant sense of tonnes of content, going back in timelines or peeking at you on sidebars

the advantage of the big sites is being able to search and filter them; searching youtube for "my first vlog" newest first, daniel lopatin's idea of having a hootsuite stream or w/e for "working on my novel" etc.

The internet surfing conditions have never been better imo. Just spend a day with archive.org! There's so much stuff there. Don't let the howlies on upworthy get you down.

I'm sure this point's been made by now, but I think it's had a negative effect on life, never mind the internet. (Mine, anyway.)

you monsters

with every post you get one step closer to becoming a harvester of sorrow

*FB post

mailing lists > Usenet forums > Livejournal > MySpace > Forums (ILX/WATMM etc) > Facebook > Twitter

Same as it ever was, really.

what about BBSs

scented doves mad underrated

realizing i could do this was a big breakthrough for me. instead of arguing w/ the void i could argue w/ ppl who i chose to friend on fb.

I feel just the opposite -- I only quarrel about politics on ILX, which is mostly separate from my IRL identity. Arguing politics on FB seems sort of obnoxious, like, why would I put my political opinions in my friends' faces? I would no more do it than I would argue about politics in person.

options open up when you realize that if it no longer shows when your wall first loads, it literally did not happen

the problem with arguing politics = friends of friends argue with other friends of friends and then it gets knockdown drag out nasty and you're like "GUYS, PLS STOP" and then five minutes later someone is lying lifeless in your living room

why would I put my political opinions in my friends' faces?

Damn, most of my friends do nothing BUT crap on about their poitical opinions .On facebook, in the pub, at someone's dinner party....

Can’t speak to “the internet” but just my own idiosyncratic pathological (((in kantian sense))) personality.

I don’t do facebook or any social media that’s tied (or tie-able) to my “IRL identity,” my proper name.

Dimly recall some article I read years ago where Zuckerberg makes reference to Stoic philosophy and something like the “radical transparency” of Facebook with respect to one’s identity— like, the idea that cultivating and manifesting a “single identity” (a centralized and ostensibly “transparent” identity/ personality, as manifest/ exercised/ performed through Facebook) = integrity. Which, ugh. (NB I’ve long studied stoic philosophy, so this reference is double ugh.)

OK just found a relevant quote: “You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” – Zuckerberg, 2009

The idea being, I suppose, that maintaining decentralized or compartmentalized aspects of your personality (your music and movie preferences, your aesthetic choices, your family life, your hobbies, your sport teams, your take on pop culture/ celebrity gossip, your religion or spirituality, your politics, etc.) is living in a kind of existential inauthenticity.

Whereas I very deeply need and relish my layers of “opacity” (by which I mean not just “privacy”) and decentralized manifestations (scribbles and doodles and babblings) of polyphonous discordant aspects of self. The idea of a “transparent” “single” “identity” (particularly qua public, as exercised and manifest through social media) is repugnant and frightful to me.

This may have more to do with my own pathologies— I may be super shy and perhaps an avoidant personality. And perhaps there is an element of “inauthenticity” or cowardice in my repugnance— but on the other hand it’s the pitfalls of “inauthenticity” here (in the Facebook model of internet self-construction or self-performance) that most repel me (particularly when it comes to politics).

TL; DR I know; will probably post some more babble later (after a little more bourbon).

not a slam, or not a deep one, but that would lose nothing if every quotation mark & parenthetical were struck

what zuckerberg misses is that judicious fragmentation was an essential component of human identity prior to the internet's integration of all spheres. the idea that this new & vastly intrusive technology in some sense morally demands a radical reconfiguration and simplification of public identity seems so naive as to verge on the idiot-criminal.

not a slam, or not a deep one, but that would lose nothing if every quotation mark & parenthetical were struck

you're OTM-- I know very well (but have not been able to rid myself of) those awful writing habits. ILX may be good for me because y'all tend to be so pithy and uncluttered and I am (so) NOT. Hope some of that will rub off on me.

lol, it was beaten out of me hereabouts, but you seem to manage a better content/digression ratio than i ever did, so more power to you.

anyway, historically speaking, one might move from whatever small town to the big city to escape the prison of comprehensive known-ness, the oppressive integration of all spheres: home, work, play, etc. why then, having escaped the benevolent & all-binding eye, would we wish to reimpose it upon ourselves, rejoin some now limitless neighborhood watch? whatever morality insists upon such a thing is both boring and tyrannical by nature.

[/rant]

no worries; i stopped reading, for better or worse, after (((in kantian sense)))

heh, glad the triple parentheses as intended did their job

((((((((((facebook is good))))))))))))

jk

i do appreciate the ability to passively keep up with people i prob wldve lost touch with tho

facebook has ruined the high-school reunion industry

lag∞n has ruined the internet

omg not my fault