Growing Old on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Growing Old on Facebook

clayallsopp.com

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The interesting comments posted before mine prompted me to read the whole fine article kindly submitted here. The article beings with "There's an entire generation where every photo, message, post, idea between adolescence and adulthood is cataloged on Facebook." The posting of photos as conveniently as Facebook allows posting photos is somewhat new (as is home Internet connections with enough bandwidth to put up with an online service jam full of photos), but on the whole this doesn't feel new to me.

Maybe Facebook doesn't feel new to me because I am old (born during the Eisenhower administration, just as the Space Age was beginning). To me, Facebook in 2012 seems much like AOL in 1998: a huge, dominant force in Internet interaction among the general public that is already doomed by fundamental flaws in its business plan. I'm old, and I have seen predictions come and go over the years, but this is my prediction about Facebook, and I'm sticking to it: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it."

Facebook makes it MORE apparent, if anything, than the earlier forms of online communication did how selectively people report details about their lives in online communities. I've known some good friends through online acquaintance, interspersed with real-world interaction, for twenty years. I'm well aware that the online picture of any person is incomplete, just as the knowledge of one person by any one acquaintance is incomplete. I think Facebook provides some convenience in keeping up with a varied group of Facebook "friends" including several of my first cousins, one of my children who has grown up and moved away from home (he was an early adopter of Facebook, and is now largely tired of it), former co-workers, classmates, current members of the same professional associations, and so on. It's a lot of fun to see friends from different phases of my life interact and learn from one another. I've managed to make my Facebook wall be like a targeted Hacker News: a place where I can find thoughtful discussion of links I discover while Web-browsing. To me, that's something well worth growing old with.

The article includes the paragraph: "You can message someone you haven't spoken with in years, and yet it visually flows right under some unimaginably unrelated conversation from 2007. And when you realize that exact numerical gap between the years, it stings a little. Reading how you've changed, how they've changed, and thinking about everything that didn't happen in-between." That is the most startling default setting of the Facebook messaging system. My email inbox, which is sorted strictly by date order, obscures the gaps in communication I have with some correspondents. (Cleaning out my drafts folder from time to time discloses those gaps.) But real-world analogies of this are receiving Christmas cards after a gap of a few years in correspondence, and the like. The strength of communication in each relationship ebbs and flows, or so I have observed for more than five decades now.

Totally agree. I've seen several things like this surge and die before.

With the Nov. 2011 edgerank changes, ie forced "close friend" newsfeed, the one magical thing about FB, which I call digital osmosis -- ie keeping up with people without interaction -- has gone the way of the dodo.

I'm planning my escape: Valentines Day 2013 I'm closing my account. Working on a toolset to host my own timeline, on my own server. May keep a fake account to access a site here or there and keep up with a few vague acquaintances, but will stop posting and handing my data over to FB.

FWIW, I find many high quality conversations on Google+ these days since they've launched their communities (e/g/ big data community, DDD).

Now get off my astroturf ;-)

I love it when 20-somethings talk about "growing old."

I'm in my 40s, and I'm pretty much the same person I was in 2007. Same haircut, same career, and mostly the same friends.

I am in my 40s also. I have not changed much in the last 5 years, but then again that is just over 10% of my life. At 25, 5 years represents 20% of your life and the part of your life where most people change a lot. Perhaps we should both do something crazy and change our hairstyle for a couple months. Then we can reminisce later about that crazy period in our forties.

"Youth is wasted on the young" - George Bernard Shaw

That quote always makes me uncomfortable. I'm 27. I spend a fair amount of time desperately trying to uncover what it is I'm wasting my youth on, or else determining what it is I've already wasted it on.

Hah. Okay, maybe that was an accidental joke.

That quote was written specifically to make you feel uncomfortable. Older people love to quote it, because we all have a catalog of things that we'd love to go back and relive more fully, or do right the first time, or not do at all. The cruel irony of it all is that you probably don't know how you're wasting your youth until you look back on it in retrospect and facepalm. Sorry.

I grew a mustache in November. How's that for crazy.

that is awesome. I still can't grow one.

> Perhaps we should both do something crazy and change our hairstyle for a couple months. Then we can reminisce later about that crazy period in our forties.

For some reason, this plan makes me (a 20-something) oddly happy. I hope you do it.

I have many aunts and married friends on Facebook who upload tons of images of their kids.

I wonder what plans, if any, Facebook has to reach out to those kids in 10 years time when they are "old enough" (heh) to use Facebook.

Can you imagine having your entire life documented on some website? Pretty creepy in my opinion. I have to discourage my wife to upload images of our kids.

I have a four-year old, and I've actually started thinking about that quite a bit.

I think an infant has no expectation of privacy. Any decisions regarding a baby's on-line presence is limited to the parent's common sense.

Now that my son is in pre-school, we're dialing back on his on-line presence. Pictures on flickr and facebook are being re-categorized to "friends and family."

As he gets older, we're going to respect his wishes as to what should be made "public." If he doesn't want the story of the cute thing he did put up on facebook, we'll honor that request.

I'll also help him navigate being on-line. I know a pre-teen whose parents won't let him use a Minecraft public server (because of the risk of creepy douchebags), but a LAN server for him and his buddies is okay.

> I think an infant has no expectation of privacy.

This is really funny out of context :)

We have photo albums going back 4 and 5 generations. We have postcards sent by great grandparents and grandparents during the first world war. I can imagine Neal Stephenson like alternative stories about people falling out when they come back...

I think that - as often with the digital/Internet thing - it is not qualitatively new having documents of yourself, but the huge increase in the quantity of this information and the way it lives outside your control. Same way that mix tapes in the two tape drive days were copyright violation, but had a considerable time and effort barrier so not too many got made and they had limited distribution. Digital copying is low effort, and broadcasting trivial. Hence problems...

PS: I'm 54 and think about Life, Time &c quite often.

I'm 32 and Facebook has turned into a nightmare cavalcade of weddings and other people's children. No more smiling faces, parties or high jinks, just more wrinkles, more responsibilities, more towing the line.

Facebook feels toxic in the sense of how it ruthlessly upholds social norms. I'm probably being whiny about it, but it seemed like FB was less about 'connection' and more about in-group maintenance.

What's so toxic about upholding social norms? You say "social norms", I say "social capital". About 40% of children grow up without both parents in the US, and the number is closer to 60% of poor children and 20% of well-off children. Before 1960, the average was 4% for all demographic groups. Growing up in a traditional family is a huge leg up in life. Popular media doesn't reinforce those traditional norms, so it's nice that we have one source that encourages the values of successful people.

If you ever have children they will be better off for your boring traditional life - encouraged by your upper-middle class friends on facebook.

I think the best leg up for a child is to be brought up in a stimulating, loving, stable environment. Whether that needs to look like a traditional nuclear family I'm not 100% sure. I think some progress can come from looking beyond the sort of social norms that a social network like Facebook seems to aggressively propagate.

I have been blocking the people who post nothing but pics of their babies. After the 50th pic, I've long lost an interest in seeing them, however adorable. Not all of my friends or family do this, and I am grateful.

You're not alone, there's actually a browser plugin to hide baby pictures on Facebook. http://unbaby.me/

That sounds like a problem with you, not with Facebook. It's important to learn to accept that you and everyone you know will grow older, age more or less gracefully, and eventually die.

Also, FWIW, while having children should, and almost always does, imply more reponsibilities; there's no required connection between the rest of the life events and behaviors you mentioned.

Agreed, its mostly a problem with me. But accepting the mortality of myself and my friends, or indeed feeling a pang for lost youth, has little to do with liking over-sharing of wedding and baby photos on public timelines. If I dig into it it's the almost aggressive reinforcement of conventional group-think and life choices that rubs me up the wrong way.

There's a little bit more to having kids than convention and group-think. You're the product of 4 billion years of organisms that decided to have 'em.

Where did I say that I was against having kids, or indeed procreation? For the record I'm ambivalent at best about the tradition of marriage (that's where the group think thing comes in I think), and (as stated) kinda sick of other people's babies on my social feed. But I wouldn't read too much more into it than that.

So, you liked the conventional group-think and life choices of 20-somethings posting photos of getting wasted at bars & parties better?

Also, if you can't take pleasure in the happiness of your "friends", then maybe they aren't your friends and, therefore, shouldn't necessarily be your "friends" either. If you get what I'm saying.

To quote myself I said "smiling faces, parties or high jinks[sic]". That doesn't necessarily equate to getting wasted in bars, or indeed betray any particularly sort of conventional group-think. I'd argue getting married (and to a much lesser extent having kids) constitutes a more real subscription to conventional life choices. Broadcasting it (semi) publicly over Facebook arguably makes it an even more overt stance. There's nothing wrong with that of couse.

Taking pleasure in a close friend's happy life moment in a real and genuine fashion, i.e. by interacting in real life, is quite different to being confronted by the over zealous activity of a Facebook "friend". It was the latter I was complaining about. And I agree, a particularly ruthless "friend" cull would largely solve the issue.

Pictures of my kid are about all I post on Facebook anymore. The constantly changing privacy settings mean I don't trust it for posting anything especially interesting, so I've mostly stopped posting at all. Every once in awhile I put up a kid picture to make relatives etc. happy, but that's basically my only use case for FB now. Especially since I stopped wanting to read other people's updates too, when I discovered that many people I know have moronic political opinions that they feel compelled to share.

So maybe people block my updates because they are tired of seeing my kid, but I've probably blocked them because I got tired of reading about how Mitt Romney wants to ban tampons or whatever.

Also, "toeing" and "hijinks".

I'd suggest Facebook isn't the best medium for sharing family photos, precisely due to its opaque privacy setting, like you say.

Are you familiar with Facebook's FTC settlement over privacy settings?

The order requires Facebook to obtain its users’ “affirmative express consent” before it can override their own privacy settings. For example, if a user designated certain content to be visible only to “friends,” Facebook could allow that content to be shared more broadly only after obtaining the user’s permission.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agree...;

I'm curious whether folks expect this settlement to keep the hijinks in line. Nothing particularly egregious seems to have happened to privacy settings since November 2011.

I have made my peace with "towing the line".

If you just consider the words, it has some different shades of meaning than "toeing the line," but the same general feeling. Instead of a pointless military drill ("toeing"), I like to conjure the image of a bunch of Egyptian slaves dragging stone blocks to build a pyramid ("towing").

Anyway, given the other solecisms out there, it will be a long road to hoe to stamp out "towing."

The split between people who have children and their friends that don't predates Facebook.

When you have kids your life changes so completely that you no longer have nearly as much in common with your friends that didn't. It is hard to imagine how social media could prevent this.

"These pristine reflections of our former selves will live on in the tombs of archived data; they will outlive us."

True. However, from what I have seen, most people don't even care what they were like before.

The majority of people are too concerned about their idiot kids and mortgages to contemplate and ponder about life, time, etc. Once you have kids and a mortgage, I doubt you will even care about backing up clayallsopp.com.

Don't take my word for it:

* the anti-war hippy generation. * the Ayn Rand crowd of the 60s/70s. * the Springsteen/anti-nuclear generation. * the Ron Paul generation.

They are all now (or will be) a bunch of yuppies worried about their retirement benefits. They have "better" things to do than to ponder about life, time, etc.

Unrelared, but something I've never figured out: How do we format lists on Hacker News?

I've seen people do it, so I know there's a way.

Leave a blank line between each item:

Alternatively, use the monospace font by putting two spaces before the text:

  1
  2 
  3

The majority of people aren't occupied with their past selves because they're concerned with raising their kids and providing for them, and that's somehow bad...?

>They are all now (or will be) a bunch of yuppies worried about their retirement benefits

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Yuppie was a generational thing. In their day, urban real estate was affordable (white flight; older people terrified of cities) and people actually could climb the corporate ladder. 25-year-old urbanites aren't true yuppies. Our generation came up in a different time.

I think you are mis-reading the intention of the post.

It's not about caring. It's not that we want to go back and relive the past. It's more about how you are ready to message someone and some older conversation from 2007 pops up. It's a weird nostalgic feeling about something you don't really care about much. But hey it's out there.

You're right. I went off on a tangent. Apologies to the author. Thanks for politely pointing that out to me.

They are all now (or will be) a bunch of yuppies worried about their retirement benefits.

Zeitgeist right there. When "yuppie" was coined, it meant "young urban professional". Those people are now pushing 60.

This and a few other interesting concerns are up in Delete[1] by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger.

This is a very interesting book that explains a lot of historical context for how the digital age differs from what came before. The linked blog post highlights the temporal aspect of digital memory - that a post from a day ago is as easily accessible as one from ten years ago.

Perhaps even more important is that because we limit what we post, context gets completely removed. So many people carefully curate their identity that the image we see of a person is not only an image from N years ago, but is also only what N years ago's version of one's self chose to publish to the web.

We definitely live in interesting times, I would encourage anyone that thinks on this phenomenon to check out the book.

1. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8981.html

Someone once reminded me of how all our digitally catalogued photos come with status messages.

I don't know what difference that will make compared to analogue Kodak moments, but it's very interesting to think about.

Mostly, I'm happy that my childhood photos won't come with horribly-spelt comments. :)

There is a way to fix this madness

http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

Nope. I treat Facebook as a 12 month delay line - any content older than that gets "deleted" (I maybe archive messages). I actually hate the whole idea and would have deleted my account a long time ago, but it's the only medium by which I'll get to see photos of my nephew until I build something simpler for our extended family to use.

I do the same thing but with 6 months instead of 12. I think the absolute limit is somewhere between 6 months and 3 months. Most stuff which is at least 3 months old is stuff whose only value is for reminiscing about later. On the other hand, sometimes I don't want to delete something at the 6 month mark because I find it to be still relevant or it is a cover/profile picture and I don't want to replace it. I've tried going without Facebook for a while, but I find that my peers use it a lot for communication. They tend not to like email which is unfortunate because email will outlive Facebook and the immediate successor to Facebook.

I must be the only one who finds that a bit... scary. But I don't keep old photo albums either.

Maybe it needs some kind of hate for your younger self to cut ties, cut hair, throw away old stuff and start a new life somewhere else, never looking back, while others reminisce.

Unrelated: what does your username mean? I'm hoping it's totally random.

It sure is.

I think of Facebook as being like 1950s TV. Peoples' pictures show the atypical moments of their lives that they wish were typical: vacations, parties and weddings. No one posts pictures of their damn cubicles or dirty laundry.

A typical person who mistook those photos to reflect how peoples' lives actually are, and not rare moments out of years, would become envious and miserable.

As with the 1950s, which were nothing like what TV portrays the era as being, I worry that future generations will see these 2012-era photos and ask if our lives really were this glamorous, with average people constantly taking vacations. Well, no. That was not reality.

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