Facebook Not So Hot

I have to say, I'm less interested in Facebook every day. I'm generally pretty bored by what I see posted there and I rarely think of anything particularly interesting that I'd like to share. (And even when I do, I rarely get any responses from people.)

The character count limits, while not as onerous as those on Twitter (where I opened an account and then immediately lost interest), tend to make it difficult to establish a point or provide a reference.

The whole collecting "friends" aspect so dilutes the meaning of the concept of friendship that it's almost offensive to me. Acquaintances? It feels neither very social nor like a network. I've gotten more connection through the random process of discovering someone's email and sending them a message than anything else. It might be useful for establishing initial contact with people, but it sustains nothing.

In fact, the most irritating moments I've had on Facebook are when I comment on the post of someone I know and one of their "friends" who is a complete stranger to me replies to my words with something asinine or snarky. It's very jarring, as though someone interrupted a conversation at a dinner party with a rude comment. I've had this happen on forums before, but the truncated format of Facebook seems to make the intrusions more likely to be off-point or misinterpreted.

And frankly, on forums people tend to ignore what I post anyway. But I've gotten asshole know-it-all conservatives, teabagger apologists, and even an alternative music snob passing judgment on comments I made in passing. At the least the music snob was just expressing a snotty opinion; the teabaggers and their ilk are simply completely full of shit, repeating their talking points and trying to sound rational or empirical while pretending they can't hear all the rabid screaming from the right that expresses the true sentiments of the movement they're defending.

Even if there was a way to have a rational conversation on certain political subjects with these people, and these days it seems that there isn't much chance of that, Facebook is a godawful medium to try to have a meaningful discussion, with its parameters limiting input to the comfortable confines of regurgitated sound bites. Plus, these people are apparently friends of other people I know, which eliminates the fall-back option of telling them to fuck off if they get too strident. I don't know, maybe I'm too picky, or I'm isolated or I avoid confrontation or I'm more like my family than most people, but over the years I've just blown off the people who are so far on the other side of the ideological fence from me that we can barely hear each other unless we shout. It kind of amazes me who pops up as friends of friends.

I think the lesson here is that I tend to be happier when I spend limited time online in general and less involved in social networking. So I'm going to start thinking about setting some time limits. Perhaps composing some of these blog entries or my web site updates while offline would be smart.

Degrees of Obscurity

I was reading an essay in Wired Magazine where Clive Thompson was discussing the pitfalls of becoming too popular on a social networking site like Twitter. The gist of the argument was that once a certain threshold of ten thousand or so followers is reached, the two-way conversation and interactivity of the network ceases as participants begin to see themselves as anonymous faces in the crowd rather than active members of a community.

My first thought on reading this was to wonder how the people taking part could tell the difference between a virtual community of 1,000 and one of 10,0000 if a single person is generating the original content. Ie., person X tweets, audience member Y considers posting a reponse. Why would it matter to Y if there were 100 people reading Y's reply versus 10,000?

I get that in front of a real crowd, there would be some anxiety. But you don't have that visceral experience with the other followers.

The other thing that threw me was the idea that a virtual community of several thousand could have "intimate" connections with each other. What? That's ridiculous. At best that community can fragment into a few tight cliques of a hundred or so each who then interact with each other.

So perhaps my confusion comes mainly from the assertion that the relationships break down starting at 10,000 or so instead of breaking down at a much lower number, say 1,000.

The line that really jumped out at me in the essay was this one: "Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals."

I read that and just blinked in amazement. If I chatted with all my pals, I could maybe get to 20.

Ironically, the whole point of the post was to celebrate the value of small group dynamics and relative obscurity, noting how they can inspire creativity, honesty, and meaningful conversations among members. It's just that what Clive Thompson considers small and what I consider small differ by an order of magnitude.

I guess I am dramatically obscure.

More and more, my interactions on the Internet leave me feeling isolated and small. I clearly had a kernel of this impression in me from the beginning, as seen from the title I chose.

I wonder if the first person who realized that all the stars in the night sky were suns with possible worlds orbiting them felt the same way.