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Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

nautil.us

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Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#151

Post by Chathamization »

jjeaff wrote: post #131
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you didn't answer the main question. What if I recognize the potential value in all of the things you mention, but don't believe in God and don't want to lie to people about it?

You don't have to lie to people. You can go to church and not believe. I know several people that do that. So, I'm assuming that you also have some qualms about how Facebook or Google does business? Does that mean you refuse to use Facebook or Google? By using commercial services, you are actually supporting them financially. You can go to most any church without donating anything at all.

I know of some people who go to church even though they don't believe, and it seems to work for them. For a lot of people, though, that becomes extremely uncomfortable. You say you don't have to lie to people, and maybe that's the case, but I suppose it depends on one's definition of a lie.

Given a prayer to a god one doesn't believe in feels dishonest for some, as does nodding along and letting people assume you share their beliefs when you don't. The foundation for church is supposed to be a shared theological belief, so it's not too difficult to understand why some might be uncomfortable joining when they know that they don't share the belief and have to go through certain motions to conceal this fact from their brethren.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#152

Post by dredmorbius »

rayiner wrote: post #110
bitexploder wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned I just don't need to live social life with distant relatives and friends every day. The important things filter to the surface of your life as do the important people. I get more value out of a longer email or a 15 minute phone call than a bunch of shallow interactions on Facebook. I suspect over time we will learn that Facebook and the like is actually poor at maintaining social relationships in a mea…

There isn’t some set number of relationships you can have such that you’ve got to pick out the “important” ones.

Actually, there very much are.

Most people are familiar with Dunbar's number, which expresses the size of a total community. That's not the number of important relationships, but essentially the number of total relationships you can juggle.

In your life, should it be a reasonably long one, you'll experience about a half-million waking hours. If you get to know 10,000 people in your life, the total time you can dedicate to any one of them is about two days (48 hours).

In The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks notes the dynamics of team communications, which rapidly develop complexity after about 5-6 members. Programming teams, unless the work can be modularised to the extent teams have full independence generally lose effectiveness as they're scaled above this level.

The Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China -- effectively the inner cabal of government -- has ranged from 5-9 members, and is presently 7. (Each of them represents the interests of about 185 million Chinese.) Again, tight working groups simply do not scale past a large size.

I've been digging at various elements of this question for a few years, largely informally. But the clear point is that your relationship time is limited, that close relationships take time and investment, and that as attention is spread, the nature of those relationships tends to deteriorate.

(I'm not aware of specific literature on this offhand though I'm certain it exists.)

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#154

Post by Chathamization »

jaredklewis wrote: post #79
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

For sure, Facebook allows you to keep up with distant family and friends. But my take is that devoting a lot of mental and emotional energy to distant relationships comes at the expense of time that could be spent developing local relationships, which can be more important. I think a good metaphor is after you've broken up with someone, it can be healthier not to hold onto to a lot of photos, memorabilia, and so on a…

One of the problems too is that it makes it more difficult to distinguish who is actually interested in being a close friend with you and who is only interested in being a casual relationship.

To give just one example - in the past, you might have gotten birthday e-mail from a few people. You would have a sense that these people thought about you enough to pay attention to your birthday and contact you. Likewise, if you cared about someone enough, you could do the same and signal that you thought of them highly as a friend.

But now you have Facebook asking everyone your connected with to leave a birthday message on your birthday. I've seen people who's Facebook accounts seem to clearly be dead, but they keep getting the same dozen birthday greetings each year from the same people who actually don't care enough about the person to notice they're no longer on.

And since the Facebook birthday seems to be the way a lot of people think about their friend's birthdays these days, not participating means that you're going to get much fewer birthday greetings than you would have in the pre-Facebook days.

Again, this is just one example, but I think it does a decent job of illustrating how Facebook has supplanted a lot of more substantive communication and replaced it with copious amounts of junk food communication.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#155

Post by bazoiks »

caterama wrote: post #55
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

Having quit Facebook some 4+ years ago, I think about these things too and have come to the conclusion that: a) I don't need to know about the project my distant friend is working on, or the food anyone is making or eating* . b) A solution that existed before Facebook were X-Mas cards. So, I think that's what I'll be doing when I no longer see my parents and close friends daily. * On a side note, my mom calls my gran…

> a) I don't need to know about the project my distant friend is working on, or the food anyone is making or eating* .

It's worse than that though - the evidence is that seeing things like that will actually make you depressed. People only post the good stuff on facebook, so it makes everyones life look better than yours is. It's very clear that social media makes people depressed.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#156

Post by nordsieck »

kbart wrote: post #138
nordsieck wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who choses to use FB is just not thinking. One of the answers to your implied question is events. I belong to one of many, many subcultures who organize almost exclusively through facebook. This one happens to be related to dancing. There are around 5 weekly events held regularly, along with a number regular of monthly-ish classes and around one special event per month held locally. Facebook is just way bett…

How it's better than email list? Getting an email event invitation once in a while looks way better than checking Facebook's spammy notifications every day to see if something is coming up.

> How it's better than email list?

1. Organizers can update events instead of sending a new message

2. Organizers get to see a list of people who claim they're going

3. The message thread and images associated with events are much easier to deal with instead of throwing everything into one big slush pile that is an email list.

4. It makes much more sense to create events way ahead of time (think a year out).

5. It's easier for participants to see which events their friends are going to.

Ultimately, email just isn't very good for a number of use cases and events is one of them. These are also some of the same reasons why people started using wikis or sharepoint instead of email.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#157

Post by freeflight »

rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

> Their social lives were narrow, focused heavily on home life and the kids. That’s what Facebook is replacing, and it’s a huge improvement.

Is it really tho? I'm not even conservative, I just think that there's certainly something to be said about a social life focused on the kids and home life, instead of replacing that with hollow attention seeking on Facebook.

What it's being replaced with? People who post pictures of their children, which to many is often the whole extent of the interaction with their kids; Just another prop to collect likes on FB.

I admit that's just my anecdotal personal experience from a really bad case, I still think it's a very relevant angle to this as many people do use Facebook as a form of escapism from reality.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#158

Post by jamesrcole »

fineline wrote: post #102
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

Are you kidding? I'm an X'er and my parents are boomers, and I can assure you we all had an absolute ball before Facebook came along. "Not going out in the evenings to see friends, sitting watching TV, having narrow social lives" - seriously? Maybe in your family / community / culture, but not mine, and not many, many others too. I'd even be tempted to speculate that those of us who aren't Facebook addicts are the on…

What geographic area is that?

I was born in Australia in the late 70s and the picture you paint of pre/post Facebook doesn't ring true to my experience.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#159

Post by gyim »

beachy wrote: post #148
Top19 wrote: post #87

Suggestion: go to church. It’s a built in community of people who are likely there because of ritual and tradition (am Catholic) and do not care about talking about startups or entrepreneurship (a breathtaking relief sometimes). Church and religion has gotten a lot well-justified complaints over the years, but by liberal and moderately-conservative people abandoning it in droves, it only made it more conservative and…

I respect your suggestion, but sadly have found myself moving in the opposite direction lately. My wife's parents are strongly religious. When my 5 year old son stays over he gets a good dose of creationism. I've always thought that that was fine. Its not my belief but I don't see why people can't hold different beliefs. I enjoyed the idea that he could make up his mind on his own. But lately, its become apparent tha…

I'm always sad when I read something like this. If believing in God and protecting the planet or accepting basic science are contrasting ideas, then your wife's grandparents are believing in a caricature, not God.

But I think you can do better than just saying "these are fairy tales". I recently read a book from a former atheist (Jennifer Fulwiler) who came from a very loving and intellectually honest family. Her father said this when she was young: "Make sure you don't start believing things just because someone says it's true, even if it's coming from me. Question everything." I wish more people would be like that, atheist and religious alike.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#160

Post by ionised »

rayiner wrote: post #110
bitexploder wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned I just don't need to live social life with distant relatives and friends every day. The important things filter to the surface of your life as do the important people. I get more value out of a longer email or a 15 minute phone call than a bunch of shallow interactions on Facebook. I suspect over time we will learn that Facebook and the like is actually poor at maintaining social relationships in a mea…

There isn’t some set number of relationships you can have such that you’ve got to pick out the “important” ones.

That's not actually true.
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