The Downside of Social Media

I find a slightly different problem: these conversations don't come up IRL at all, because they've already occurred online, and this prevents a more meaningful discussion.

To use the example from TFA, if someone tells you that their ex got in contact with them recently, you might ask them how they feel about it, what [s]he's been doing recently, and so on: you'd have a conversation. If you've already seen this online, it's likely that it would never come up at all - and you probably wouldn't ask those questions on your facebook wall, as it's not private.

Facebook is particularly bad for this, because it ostensibly covers almost every aspect of your life: replacing conversations with data points.

Facebook et. al. are sucking the social marrow out of our lives. Why talk about the birth of your child? You've already shared umpteen photos of it. Why talk about that new job? You've already changed your profile data and it automatically propagated.

We should deeply consider how much time, attention and prominence we give to social media. It's a black hole.

When I gave up social media for a month (my friends are all very heavy Twitter users), the biggest thing I noticed was deeper and more in-depth conversations. I was excited to see people. I actually -missed- my friends when I didn't see them, because I didn't know what they were up to every second of every day.

If you're interesting enough, you can find something more interesting to talk about!