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Comment by pwaai | Hacker News Reader

I'm appalled that everybody carries around a real time yearbook. High school seems to never end. I shudder the effect this app will have on the self esteem of the user.

We didn't know tobacco was harmful back when everybody was doing it. We didn't know cocaine was harmful back when it was the thing. We also don't know about the sort of damage and stress of the human psyche with these engineered digital toxins.

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Yes, we know that this (mobile devices, mostly) is causing issues with developing empathy and communication skills.

See "Reclaiming Convestaion": https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Conversation-Power-Talk-Di... for much more detail.

I think that for America, and white america in particular life's non plus ultra is senior year of high school. At the very least country music seems to paint this picture.

what does non plus ultra mean? i looked it up but couldn't find a clear definition

contextually it seems like it means "peak"?

It means "nothing further beyond"; life never moves beyond the senior year of high school.

I feel like if you look at a country's high school culture, you can get a feel for what their values are.

For example, students from Korea are studious, exam taking machines and there's no "jock" culture. The smartest cookies are the "jocks". "Jocks" are looked down upon.

In contrast, students in USA seem, at least White America, seems uninterested, unmotivated or believe in studying. Everybody's trying to become an NBA or NFL player or a celebrity. People who excel academically are shunned and looked down upon.

Maybe there's an interesting link somewhere.

Facebook is nothing like a "real-time yearbook", though.

I think it's actually quite an apt metaphor. Yearbooks are a collection of snapshots-in-time and the kind of trite social cache signalling of shallow observations and pseudo-intellectual "deep" insights about who's going to make what of themselves that only an immature, ignorant, inexperienced kid can make. That's exactly what Facebook is: a forum for the most trite kinds of social engagement and signalling.

...Or it's just a site to keep up with friends through messenger, events, pictures, etc?

You just have to do a bit of work to filter out the crap from your timeline (unfollow/unfriending)

What you are saying might be true, except:

There are too many idiots who go and "tag" photos with people who are not active on Facebook and help create a shadow profile.

There are too many idiots who willingly give Facebook the permission to mine their address book to triangulate the phone number + name + email address + misc. contact info of people who are not active on Facebook and help create a shadow profile.

There are too many idiots who don't think one extra second about filling up the messages they send to other people who are not on Facebook with all kinds of sensitive information and help create not just a shadow profile, but one which can be mined in ways that the idiots don't ever want to acknowledge.

Oh, and there are too many idiots who think that their "right" to use Facebook also gives them the right to send the personal information of other people to Facebook, whether or not those other people consent to such abuse of trust.

So yes, it is just another site. The smart folks who are concerned about tattling on their friends have mostly left. The remnants are mostly idiots, and damn it, I just can't find a way to stop these idiots from being so idiotic other than filling up internet comment threads with not-so-subtle hints about how these idiots are fucking up my life. Do you have any suggestions for how I can stop these idiots from acting in such an idiotic way?

You have important points, but your tone defeats your purpose. Would have liked to read this comment again without the unfunny over-usage of “idiot”.

At best, their behavior is idiotic. But short of consuming our entire vocabulary with ever-further steps of euphemism, there are few if any accurate alternative descriptions of the set of people who trust Facebook.

"Naïve", perhaps, but that excludes the vast swath of people who trust Facebook for more than a rather short duration of time.

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