johnhall wrote:
Unfortunately, as much as I want to support Peter, I can't support the Facebook effort.
First, I just won't do Facebook (notwithstanding the official page we have run by the younger folks in the company). To my eyes it has no meat and the interface just looks amateurish. (To be fair, so does Google to me . . .) As it exists now, it seems to be a colossal time waster.
A waste of time indeed. Nobody in my house -- my wife, my kids, nor myself -- participate in Facebook. We used to do Friendster & MySpace back in the day, and those were enough of a waste of time without 800 million people. Not only does Facebook seem like a waste of time to me as well, but I don't need people thinking they are my friend, or having a supposed a right to know what's happening in my life because they click an icon and type a vapid sentence in broken English. If people want to know me or claim to know me they can make plans to talk to my face.
I hope Peter doesn't mind if I quote him from a recent conversation we had over PM:
admin wrote:...one is never really sure of the context when discussing matters on a forum such as this. Who is paying attention, who is competent, who is impaired, who is disordered and so forth.
This encapsulates internet culture and internet communication beautifully; there's no inflection, body language, or anything else which constitutes
real, functional communication. Only a small percentage of communication involves actual words: 7%, according to research; 55% of communication is visual (body language, eye contact) and 38% is vocal (pitch, speed, volume, tone of voice). Most of these things are lost in a medium such as this, so we're effectively communicating
93% less information when we just type a sentence. This is not considering that most sentences typed on internet forums, Facebook, and SMS are in broken English/internet short-hand, and usually devoid of punctuation or emphasis beyond misused exclamation points and comma splices. We're all becoming less able to adequately participate-in and interpret face-to-face communication, have less self-control/discipline, and a diminished capacity for self-expression as we give more credence to a significantly less-informational format. It's not like everyone is suddenly going to become better at expressing themselves in the written form; an individual's ability to express themselves adequately in-writing has been in a steep decline, and lack of ability to write clearly also leads to a lack of ability to comprehend reading.
(This post to be followed by emoticons, unsubstantiated references to passive mass-media like television shows/movies, non-informational I-statements, non-sequiturs, general hemming-and-hawing, etc.)
It's absolutely McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, and the Tetrad of Media Effects; the technology presents itself as a tool for social interaction, so we externalize that ability for interaction, thus making us all more socially inept without the tool ... and not especially adept
with it, either. Access to a keyboard for people who are not adequately trained to express themselves in the written form (a failure of the educational system) is not unlike when a child first starts to discover how to vocalize; lots of nonsense, grunting, whining, and tantrums. At least most parents continue to refine a child's ability to speak to varying extents; would that writing followed suit, but now we have essentially more writing with exponentially less training.
Certainly RickResource will garner more visibility by expanding its horizons to something as monumental and global as Facebook, but it's not for me. It makes sense in terms of promotion for businesses with 800 million people on the line, but otherwise I can find more productive and meaningful ways to occupy my time. I personally think an enhanced focus on "business" is the opposite of what the world needs right now, especially if it's at the cost of personal, qualitative substance and discipline.
