Hard to not see facts like this. Here at Brazil, i guess it´s even worse. People tend to share the best moments of their lives just to show how cool or amazing they are. And it´s not only pics. Sometimes small texts like "i´m going to USA, wanna come with me?" and nonsense things like that. Just to say: "hey loser, i´m going to the USA and you are not!". But, LOOK AROUND you. Are not we doing this all day long, even out of the internet? You see, internet, cloud and social networks are just extensions of the real world. Basically, what we do on internet are thing we do on real life. When we get an shine new car for example and invite friends to our home to see it. Or when we got some new gadget and wanna show it to our coworkers. I guess the point is that internet gives more power to those who wants to act like that, but it´s not internet´s fault, it´s a human behavior that needs to be.
Stop externalising your life
81–90 of 160 posts
Re: Stop externalising your life
#82"you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people." Humans are social animals. Everything we do is focused on making ourselves look attractive to other people. People who don't do this are typically not liked by others. The fact that most people do the behaviors the author describes and yet a…
I agree. The author identifies a near universal human behavior and his reaction is to condemn it as tearing apart human society. I don't think so. More like it speaks to something deeply ingrained in our nature, something we evolved because it was beneficial to survival.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#83The Internet is only 20 years young. In Internet years that is ancient but technology and the way people use it always goes through progressions.
Early on, the Internet was largely about research and news. Then, people realized they could shop online: E-Commerce, dotcom bubble. Step 3, everyone could have their own little domain, Blogs and personal websites. Then, the Internet became the place to be entertained, video, music, games. Now, we can be social and share everything with our network of "friends".
Obviously this is just one guy's synopsis and it's probably out of order in some ways. There has also been lots of overlap during the progression.
It's not that strange that we are where we are. When I was a bit younger many people I knew had personal websites. Then they migrated to blogs. Now they're on facebook and twitter. They'll move on to something else.
The social aspects of the Internet will morph into something else. The fundamentals will stay but the methods and purposes will change.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I frequently continue programming/typing, slip in an audio note to self or search the web via Google Now, while holding a normal conversation. And people with whom I interact got used to this to the level of requiring me to have the data from Wikipedia ready for the continuation of the discourse. :) If you ever do that while talking to me, I'm off. If you don't want to talk, don't, but if I'm genuinely less interes…
I can think of several reasons: 1. It would be insulting to do that. 2. Most people understand that as long as the flow of conversation is maintained, it doesn't really matter what else you're doing. People have conversations while doing other things all the time. 3. Doing something else while conversing with someone doesn't actually mean you're less interesting than that something else. It means that temporarily, th…
2. The more attention you're giving to other things, the less conversational flow is maintained, period. It doesn't matter how good at multi-tasking you are, anything less than undivided attention is sub-optimal.
3. If there is an actual, explainable reason, the person will understand. If the reason is "I felt like checking email/facebook," you are demonstrating that they are not capturing your attention at that time.
4. Sometimes people aim for a higher level of engagement than "not actively damaging our relationship."
All that said, I'm guilty just like anyone else. I fully agree that taking a few seconds to look up some information can enhance the conversation. Even that breaks the flow though, as the other person is left to stare around or start looking at their phone (assuming a two-person situation), but it's worth it. But, there's a fine line between that action and doing other things that have no relevance to the other person (which is what the GP was talking about - leaving voice memos to self, really?).
Re: Stop externalising your life
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big advantage of Facebook or Twitter over slide evenings is that it’s much easier to skip a FB update you don’t care about (or even skip all updates from someone) than it was to duck out of a slide evening. Even better, you may have friends who are not overly selective about what they share, but still share something worthwhile every now and then. With social media, it’s fairly painless to pick our the worthwhile…
I can't really refute any of that, it's a good takedown of the analogy. I'm trying to draw parallels which help me understand what's happening and behave appropriately but yes, there are very relevant differences. I suppose I would say two things, one serious and one silly: The serious is that I actually do find it harder and harder "to pick out the worthwhile pieces" in social media. I'm adding more people, they're…
The problem with the messy feeds is quite real for me too. I find that in Facebook, things tend to balance out reasonably well: Most friends don’t write a flood of updates, or particularly long updates, and the feed balancing algorithm seems to present me with a reasonable mix of updates.
I’m far less active in Twitter, where I seem to easily get overwhelmed by a flood of small updates, or G+, which seems to attract highly prolific writers.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#86Externalizing isn't just pictures. It's words, as well. They are often more powerful than pictures, when in the right hands. I find it a bit amusing that the OP externalized his trip in an article about how people shouldn't externalize--describing not just where he was ( Singapore! ), but how long he was there ( a whole month! ), the food ( exotic! ), sights ( there were so many! ), and his reasoning, as well ( to im…
"Externalizing isn't just pictures. It's words, as well."
Indeed. In her memoir Images and Shadows, Iris Origo quotes Virginia Woolf on a visit to Thomas Hardy, in which (as I recall--I don't have the book here) Woolf was constantly aware of how she was going to be writing it up.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#87 "It’s not real life, of course, because people overwhelmingly post about the good things whereas all the crappy, dull or deep stuff doesn’t get mentioned."
I think social media is what you make of it and who you stack your social media accounts with. If you stack them with people who only post how awesome they are, this is what you will get out of it.
My Twitter feed is a rollercoaster. I have people who share their awesome moments and their horrible moments and their thoughts and hopes and dreams and their humour. If you "follow" just anyone just because you want to be popular and have a lot of followers, you ARE going to get a lot of junk and no real content. Rather than "stopping our externalizing" I think that we, as the viewers of our social media feeds, need to take responsibility for the kind of people we choose to have in our feed.
Honestly, trying to tell people what to or not to post is like censorship. Stop burning the books and instead make a choice not to read them. Fill your life with content that makes you happy.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#88Stop complaining about opt-in social media.
Hear Hear!
Re: Stop externalising your life
#89Look at it from the other perspective: I really like to check Facebook or Twitter and see what my friends and family are doing, what they're enjoying, what they are thinking. By sharing these things, they are also making me happier.
Re: Stop externalising your life
#90The funny thing is, most people I know completely agree with this viewpoint. "Yep, it's tearing the fabric of society apart alright. It's creating a generation of self-interested media whores." But wait, aren't you one of them? Didn't you just post a picture of those tacos you made last night? "Yeah man, they were freaking awesome tacos. " Yes, it's a little narcissistic. Yeah, it's disruptive to your actual in-the-m…
One of the reasons that I got into photography is that I found that people around me were doing a piss-poor job of capturing those "important moments" (especially the important moments of my own life). So at many events with friends, my presence with a camera lets other people keep their phones in their pockets to enjoy the experience while I'm the one capturing it.
And it's a really cool experience to upload an album and see everyone instantly forming a web of interaction within a few minutes. Not just liking and commenting, but sometimes 40% of the attendees using your photo(s) as their profile pictures; all identifying themselves through your viewfinder.