Do not go gentle into that good night
Tonight I found out that a friend of mine from college, a professor still teaching at the school, passed away rather suddenly and abruptly at the age of 59. A great man, former military, who taught kids how to draw. He’d just returned from a trip to Thailand.
This is the second death that I’ve heard about by way of FB in the last three weeks and as the news of his death travels, I am both amazed and grateful for Facebook in way that I haven’t quite accepted yet. It has allowed the hundreds of thousands of us that were his students, his military buddies, his friends, and his family to share in our grief from all over the place. Some of these people I haven’t seen in several years—we keep in touch with the occasional email or the once in a blue moon phone call. In a way, we are able to reach out to one another, have something to touch that Tom “touched” even though it isn’t “physical” per se…
Over the last few years, I have learnt about the passing of several friends by way of the internet—specifically Facebook—and have made much fuss over the inappropriateness of such notification. I suppose my opposition came from the fact that I grew up in a time when such terrible news was passed by way of telephone, letter, and in person. However, as time has passed and the breadth of my social circle has scattered itself across the globe, the quickness with which news spreads online has somehow allowed me to be closer to those who mutually share in loss—no matter where in the world they may be.
I don’t know quite what to say. The shock of it all is so fresh. To share the news is to somehow share with one another a mutual understanding of the loss we all share in the absence of the ones that left us too soon.
I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because they feel like malls to me. Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.
William Gibson (via mattermedia, davidbarrie)
I felt the same way … until twitter redesigned their interface. #TheNewTwitter has all the charm of meeting at a food court in the basement of a mall: I’d like to talk but I can’t hear you above the fluorescent glare and the smell of the deep fryers.
(via hm3)
^This!
Source: hm3
Dear Twitter,
Everything about you is angled towards simple, efficient minimalism -from 140 characters to the lists feature to the nifty little “retweet” icon that you created. Why do you insist on borrowing clutter from Facebook? Not only have you littered my sidebar with the new “Who to Follow” feature, but you have killed, on some fundamental level, the very organic way in which I like to find new information (or followees, if you will). There is a certain amount of fun in raiding someone else’s feed for clever anecdotes or interesting links, which ultimately might lead me to follow someone new. I like Twitter because it’s streamlined and for the most part, I only have to see the information that I have chosen to see (i.e. from the people I personally have handpicked to follow). Twitter, you are not a social network. You are an information exchange network. Why must you change your mind and add to the information overload that your users didn’t have to be subjected to prior to this new feature?
Please change it back… or at least add a “Hide” function so that we don’t have to look at it if we don’t want to.
Privacy: You Get What You Give
So many seem to grouse lately about online privacy and the notion that none of the companies/social platforms are listening to their users where this is concerned. Facebook, in particular, seems to be an ongoing scapegoat. Whine, whine, whine. The fact is, all of these companies and social platforms are listening. However, the difference is that they are responding to a user base that is not strictly limited to their actual current users.
They are responding to the shift of a social and cultural paradigm.
It has become acceptable on some latent level to remove the filters that once existed between our private and public lives. We volunteer more information about ourselves than we ever have and it’s without prodding or force. The line between what should be public and what should not has become blurred. Why? With so many avenues to choose from, sharing has become autopilot to such extent that people frequently forget to ask, “Is this something that everyone would want to know? Should know?”
Why do we share? Because connecting with something beyond yourself is part of the human experience. Why do we share more? Perhaps it’s that we’re strangely more comfortable with being more open. Perhaps it’s the illusion that anonymity on the Internet still equates to being anonymous. Perhaps it’s the fact that with the ability to connect with more people in more places has made us somehow more lonely behind our computer screens.
Facebook and all of its friends look at it this way: Your willingness to share this information says more about you than what you’re actually sharing. Facebook didn’t force anyone to sign up and to share their entire life story for all the world to see. There are more than enough ways within the platform to hide this information and more. And here’s a genius idea. If you don’t want other people knowing certain things, how about NOT posting that information at all?
Whining and complaining about the privacy policies of these platforms is the equivalent of refusing to take responsibility for your own actions. Fred Wilson talked about this very thing in a short & excellent post a couple of days ago.
If you can spend the time to share the information, you can take the time to protect it.
*Personally, I’d be interested in what happens to all this Facebook data when Facebook pulls a Friendster and naturally implodes in another five years or so. By 2016, there oughta be room for all that stuff on a single Chinese thumbdrive.
I love Bruce Sterling.
Facebook backlash time | Beyond The Beyond
(via heyitsnoah) (via mikehudack)
(via notational)
Source: heyitsnoah
