Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

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You point to the #1 biggest wonderful feature of email.

Sending email is an act that incurs responsibility. WHY are we sending all this shit around? Email makes it clear. I have made a decision that you should spend your time reading and understanding this text. If that's rude, tell me and I'll stop.

This article strikes a chord because email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling.

I'm awash in a sea of tweets and notifications but when I see a familiar name as the sender of an actual goddamn email, then I feel reality existing again.

I have a friend who can't stop dreaming about hypothetical advances in social networking that will let us do all kinds of wonderful things, but it'll never be good enough, convenient enough — no technology will ever do the real work of social caring, no shiny app will ever let humans communicate in a way that's easy and non-messy.

There's some kind of consumerism-type ideology around social networks and apps that works like that of beauty magazines and television. TV is boring so Facebook is the new Friends.

It's all so happy, creative, wonderful. There should be a social network that says "fuck you" to all the cutesy glitter on the top of the Maslow pyramid — that's only about, say, "sharing" expressions of the dull lethargy that comes from exhausting oneself with work or work-seeking in a crisis economy.

Sorry for ranting, but this deeply-rooted nausea w/r/t the social web is something that doesn't come out clearly for me all the time, and when it does I feel like I should channel it to get some affect going, because everything is so tediously pastel and we need to change shit up.

Hi. Long-time lurker here; I just created an HN account to reply to you. Your post expresses some of the things I've been feeling about social media that I haven't been able to express very well myself (I had to look up "Maslow pyramid"). The sort of unease and nausea, the whole thing just feels somehow creepy and wrong.

I deactivated my Facebook account long ago because of this feeling. I think what it boils down to is that I don't think I should know so much stuff about my friends, family, co-workers, etc without having obtained that knowledge by directly interacting with them in meaningful ways over long periods of time. The Facebook model appears to let me know people better, but it's in a shallow, passive way and encourages me to conceptualize people as caricatures, assembled from a handful of their most obvious or outstanding personality traits. I realize this stuff has been around for a long time, but FB turbo-charges it, and I feel like it's an extremely poor way to "know" people.

The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.

>The really messed up part is that while the effects Facebook seems to have are often anti-social (think of how many times you've been out with someone and they're too busy checking status updates on their phone to carry on a real, actual conversation), people are labelled anti-social for not participating.

Your certainly not the first person to point this out. [0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28novel%29

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

(Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle[1], 1854)

[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_Without_Principle

I agree that your points do apply to the majority of facebook users. However, I think fb can be very useful as a social messaging/event calendar if applied properly. Without sacrificing the importance of direct social interaction.

To me it makes me wonder if the application or the popular belief of usage is the problem.

"email is about communication instead of endless "sharing," broadcasting, forwarding, signalling."

I'm in the minority, but Facebook literally depresses me (and by literally, I literally mean literally), and I quit long ago. All these words, and no communication. It's like I'm in a crowd, and the only thing I know about the other people in the crowd is what their Tshirts say.

I communicate by email with most of the people I knew on Facebook, and I'm very happy with that communication channel. Because it's actual communication, rather than mere display.

This is also why HN is my preferred news source. Besides the focused yet eclectic aggregation, the comments are actual communication, not just "regulars" on a typical newspaper's comment forum insulting each other. It's been said many times, but I get as much or more from the comments as I do from the articles, not least because I have to engage my brain to comment.

I think you nailed it. My feeling is that if its not worth the time or consideration to send someone a email then why bother sharing it at all. The mindless broadcasting/signaling with no real intent seems cheap and not terribly interesting.

I see the value perhaps in Facebook as a a glorified catalog of your interests and liked content, as a canonical record of your browsing.

The content I like best in my Facebook news feed are links to content on the web.

There is this one girl I barely know, who regularly posts the coolest and most obscure old music videos from the 50s and 60s. To me she is the ideal Facebook friend.

You may enjoy the following TED Talk on the consequences of ``sharing'': http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

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