Down With Facebook: Mind-Numbing Inanity
The reason to hate Facebook is because of the stultifying mind-numbing inanity of it all, the sheer boredom. If Facebook helps put together streakers with voyeurs, the streakers, for the most part, after shedding their trench coats, seem to be running around not with taut and tanned hard-bodies, but in stained granny panties with dark socks. They have a reality-show star's unquenchable thirst for broadcasting all the details of their lives, no matter how unexceptional those details are. They do so in the steady, Chinese-water-torture drip of status updates. The very fact that they are on the air (or rather, on Facebook) has convinced them that every facet of their life must be inherently interesting enough to alert everyone to its importance.
~Matt Labash, in The Weekly Standard via (Newmark's Door)
10 Comments:
Did you actually read that entire article? What a pompous ass!
His article about Facebook is the electronic equivalent of an oenophile turning up his nose at a friend ordering wine by the glass.
Fark his e-elitism.
wow.
What the hell was he doing on Facebook in the first place? I have found it a great way to keep in touch with friends and family after relocating 1900 miles away.
I liked the article - and I actually posted it on my Facebook profile for others to read :-) I have mixed feelings about Facebook - it is a good way to keep in touch with old friends, but I find that the people who are most active are not the people that I want to keep in touch with. So what happens is I end up learning a lot about people that I really don't care about and little about people I do care about. The new Facebook layout allows you to remove people from your "feed" which I've been doing but I still get overwhelmed by noise. (And I've had the exact same experience as him with my girlfriend and her nose in the laptop while surfing Facebook).
Certain aspects of Facebook bother me, like the people updating their status every 10 minutes. I dont care that your about to take a shower or watch American Idol, and I dont see why YOU should even waste your time posting such trivialities. My complaint is more with twitter than it is with Facebook. People who follow worthless celebrity twitters are tools. Who the hell cares if Ashton Kutcher just got a haircut!!!
Asa,
That is why you use 'hide' or 'see less about' the people that you do not want to hear about. It's what I do...
What happened to the Austrian / Masonomics ideal of withholding value judgments? This post is all about bad, bad economics, really. It obfuscates the glory that is facebook.
Keeping in touch with friends, sharing your life with them, and moving forward with them has never been easier. We can network, learn of comparative advantage, and because the cost of information transmission is just so low, we are all so much better off. If some facebook activities seem to border on mind-numbing inanity (like the equally arbitrarily-decided-to-be inanity of fashion, toy, entertainment industries and the like), then articles like this are exasperating inanity.
( Props to the Professor for being wise enough to let someone else do his dirty work in typing this out, but SOMEONE had to come up with the title. ;) )
Asa,
Probably the most interesting thing about Facebook is that once you friend someone it's very unlikely you'll remove them as friends. That would be an interesting topic for Perry to look at.
There is definitely a cost to removing even the most annoying, removed people.
Through Facebook, I was able to communicate with family members that I had never known; and in some cases never even knew existed - including the children and grandchildren of a half-sister from a hidden part of my father's long-ago life. When someone gets too annoying or noisy, I just 'defriend' them or hide them. I certainly don't live my life around facebook as some appear to do, but it is nice to be able to stay in touch so conveniently. Like most things, it has its good and not-so-good characteristics. I am happy to take advantage of some of the features it has to offer, and ignore those that I don't care for.
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"Facebook is fun for a few months, and then it becomes a massive distraction to all but those with the lowest opportunity cost of their time"...
One thing about Facebook's appeal Robert Miller, its free and easy to use for the 'time wasters'...:-)
BTW like blogging/reading blogs one can occassionally learn something and that's not necessarily a bad thing...
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