Way to go, I am sure some crass go getter is staking this concept out as we speak.
The Horrible Future of Social
131–140 of 159 posts
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#132Might not have the same
specs but close, http://www.guyskeepscore.com/
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#133I'm so going to build sex.ly!
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#134Heh. The author is completely wrong. Sex is not something important. It is a basic human bodily function, alongside eating and sleeping. For nearly the entirety of our evolution, sex was used primarily for bonding, its reproductive role is rare in comparison. It most certainly is a prudish view that sex should be hidden away out of some misguided belief that it makes it 'special'.
We could treat eating the same way. Never admit you eat, or if you do only speak of it in terms of immature titillation and euphemisms. When you do eat, never do it with anyone else, not even friends you consider very close, because that would somehow taint everything. There is at least one culture that adopted this exact view, their views on eating mirroring our with regards to sex. Eating with someone you are not married to was considered highly taboo, while having sex with various people for fun was understood as something so fundamentally human that restricting access to it would be impossible.
And ignoring whatever moral implications the culture you grew up in pounded into you as a child, just consider the basic biological matters. Abstinence is horrendously dangerous to health. Ever read a news story about how 'sex reduces the chance of heart attack by one half', 'frequent orgasms extend life', etc? Those stories are interpreting fact from a prudish perspective that limits sex severely. View the exact same facts from a perspective of frequent sex as part of basic human interaction and the headlines would read 'abstinence doubles the chance of heart attack', 'orgasm starvation cuts years off life', etc. There is good biological evidence that human beings evolved having sex after nearly every meal, along with sleeping in two blocks rather than one.
The real kicker is the origin and reason behind why we believe sex should be hidden and that it is somehow 'special'. That was invented in the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, no one in the lower class even had private bedrooms. Families slept, and screwed, in common rooms. They had to import views on sex from cultures with dowries, and children being viewed as the property of their fathers making sex a property crime against the father. And we preserve a remarkable amount of this framework even though we don't recall where it came from. None of their motivations exist any longer. We have effective birth control, and we have evidence for the suffering attempts to destroy sex cause. Eventually, hopefully, as a culture we'll grow up enough to ask ourselves what evidence we have that sex is somehow 'special' and what consequences such a view inflicts on people.
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was watching some video the other day where Jon Stewart made a random appearance. All the people around him had their phones out taking pictures of him instead of actually experiencing him being there. It was like proving to other people that they'd had an awesome experience was more important than actually having that experience. Or like they were going through life as tourists, making sure they checked every box…
Isn't it kind of cynical to assume the reason they are taking a picture is because they want to brag about it to their friends? I have I'm guessing 10-20k pictures I've taken in the last 12 years. I've taking probably > 1k pictures with my phone this year. I've shared less than 2% of them. I happen to enjoy looking back at all these photos. They bring back memories of various events in my life. IMO, memories I'd like…
> Also I don't see a problem with sharing. It's not a substitute for face to face time but it's connecting with people MORE not less. Go back 25 years and you could rarely connected with anyone unless you were with them. Now you can connect all the time by sharing your experiences. Some people do it brag, most do it to share and connect. At least in my experience.
The problem could be exactly that you don't see any problem.
"Connecting all the time" isn't a positive thing; just a few days ago there it's been posted the "Culture of distraction" article.
Also, why assuming that "sharing experiences" is positive? Assuming that "the Facebook way" is the standard in today's experience sharing, most of the "experiences" are banal almost-everyday happenings.
The problem is cultural and it's subtle, although I think it's way more complex than a dualistic living something vs. being and audience of it.
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#136I see this every time I go to Disney World (I live nearby). It's almost impossible to enjoy a single ride or fireworks show without a ton of people videoing the whole thing or taking horrible pictures of it with a smart device of some sort. Rather than enjoying it and capturing some deep memory of a moment with their family, they have their face stuck in a digital device capturing a crude facsimile of the experience…
There is the off-chance that the effort to capture these experiences leads a parent to get a picture of that child meeting her favorite princess or a snapshot of their son seeing a fireworks show at Disneyworld for the first time. There's a difference between mindless capture and capture with a purpose. Some people do it terribly (I've been to a few really nice restaurants, and have had the experience nearly ruined b…
I can't bring myself to take photos of my meals in restaurants, no matter how beautiful the food it. It just seems too impolite. And in a strange way, I feel bad about this.
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#137I see this every time I go to Disney World (I live nearby). It's almost impossible to enjoy a single ride or fireworks show without a ton of people videoing the whole thing or taking horrible pictures of it with a smart device of some sort. Rather than enjoying it and capturing some deep memory of a moment with their family, they have their face stuck in a digital device capturing a crude facsimile of the experience…
I was at a dance club the other night. I saw a couple sitting in the corner. They didn't dance at all. They just sat there looking depressed. A little later I noticed they had their phones out and were taking photos of each other as though they were having a big time partying. Then they put their phones away and left.
I saw the same thing once and it was quite a revelation for me. I experienced it positively, in the sense that I now see people's "crazy" party pictures in a different way. It made me focus on what those nights were actually like when I lived them.
There are always sporadic moments of fun, but also quite a bit of boredom and being in places I didn't want to be, later than I wanted to be out.
It made me realize that thinking that stuff isn't anywhere near as fun as it looks isn't about sour grapes or being a square -- it's true. I had always felt this way in the back of my head but something about the experience put it all together.
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#138I guess it's a nice thing about the internet that people can be disgusted by casual sex like the author and not realize there's a vibrant set of sites and people who are totally into it. He can have his own set of internet sites he visits, etc.. The various sex social networks are pretty damn useful if you want to help sort out who on the internet will actually meetup and who is just an online scammer, which are endl…
I must be in the minority for not thinking he was referring to Adult Friendfinder, Fetlife, or Grindr with this. I saw it more as Zyngafication. Pop-ups and badges and er, ahem, viral aspects and "achievements".
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#139Meh. This is a touch over-the-top. You know what Facebook is to me nowadays? It's another flavor of Gmail. Sometimes I send and receive messages there. It's plumbing. Sometimes I turn the spigot on for some updates, then turn it off and go about my day. I think pro-social and anti-social pundits are both wrong about the upside and downside of social. Social is neither the next giant leap forward, nor is it the downfa…
Except FB (well, plus mobile), has managed to change people's behaviors. Your flight is delayed, you are sitting at the airport lounge - and everyone is monkeying with his or her device. No more talking to strangers. Gmail hasn't done that.
Admittedly I am not exactly humanity's greatest advocate, but I wouldn't talk to strangers anyway -- I would read. Changing the medium from paper to a screen doesn't really affect that.
Re: The Horrible Future of Social
#140"You were repulsed by the above description of this imaginary site." No really, no. Everything described already exists (except the sex-cred, and the geo-tagging is rather manual); simply not on the open internet.
I'm pretty sure the sex-cred and other stuff already exists as well. There are active user-driven communities for swingers and kinky people much as there are for every other specialist hobby/lifestyle.
There are online communities, but not the sort of gamification he referred to.