What's the deal with Facebook? (page 3)

VampireDCLXV

Come to think of it, yep, I agree with OUTLAW...

Facebook... about as fun as watching paint dry...

V665

cantleave

Thanks for the Southpark clips - I must add you sometime!

ziddina

(@ Can'tLeave... And all in fun... )

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!!! [runs away, screaming!!!]

compound complex

How do they feel about being deleted? Could they resent me for ultimately rejecting them? Some people get very offended when relationship status is changed.

CC

It's social media, so the emphasis is contact over content as Douglas Rushkoff points out. The thing is the content people put on there is often very .. simple, shall we say. It may not even be as involved as saying what you had for lunch, people might just click "Like" to something that's already out there. And of course it's largely used for marketing too. Having a list of friends with all their updates in one place creates a sense of connectivity though. So while the structure of the site definitely has an influence, in the end it's kind of a lens for human behavior. It tends to be much easier to get interaction with things that are not particularly thoughtful - like most social interactions.

letsslatejws

Depends what your looking for on Facebook.

Theres a number of EX JW sites like Ex JW C@fe, where you can talk about stuff like on here. Then theres the putrid site the mirrored page the JW's use called JW C@fe, it makes you wanna puke when you realise all they can pretty much say is hello from Poland etc....

ziddina

Oh, yes, Let's slate... That JW C@fe site - makes me want to !! Such GOOD little JWs!!! All on Facebook, going against every talk on the internet and internet socializing that the Watchtower Society has come out with...

Yuk.

Markfromcali

Yeah but that's essentially just a forum on Facebook isn't it? So the format itself is pretty much the same as a forum like this, it's just that it happens to be on FB.

A simple way to look at it is quality vs. quantity as far as your social connections go. Here is a good article that gets into it in a little bit in depth:

http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/

 what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When they've shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.

sd-7

Facebook is the beginning of what will evidently become Skynet, and bring Judgment Day, which has thus far been considerably behind schedule. Indicating that several more Terminators have inexplicably failed to shoot one guy in the head. Wow. Robots are gonna suck...

Mad Sweeney

To me, Facebook is useful to communicate with long distance friends and family without having to bother with a phone call, letter, or email. It's called social networking because that is what it is. Networking and social.

"Demented and sad, but social."

What's the deal with Facebook?

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