One is... I've watched too many breaking up couples put each other's dirty laundry out in public for the whole social circle to look at.
Same with former friends.
Also, if it's a big enough website and popular enough... all of your relatives, your entire family and everybody you ever went to school with, including the people you dislike, are on it.
I can see most of those people in person or offline. Online should be different sometimes, I think.
Your boss, your teachers, your coworkers, they all use it too. No escape. I feel that life needs things to be compartmentalized sometimes.
You should not have everything always have such a huge pond ripple butterfly effect.
That you are getting engaged to someone to me that would be something important. I wouldn't make it be an impersonal status message all willy nilly. I'd craft a letter, with that person then we'd run a bunch of copies off, or settle on a layout we liked, and email it to an agreed upon list of friends and people.
For the dignity of the people with whom you are intimate with, if you respect the relationship, why in the hell are you updating random people on the internet each time you are having sex???
To rub it in people's noses I suppose. To go, aren't I a cool guy/gal, I get to get lucky... sort of defeats the personal nature of such a thing. In my opinion.
Nothing is deep and personal, if you are spreading it around like so much prepackaged manure...
There are people on the sites I go to, who no we aren't on each others' friends lists, but we talk regularly and they've given me decent leads to good information that sped up my research, links to good decent software & we talk about deeper stuff, than some of my "fans" on places. Where we barely ever talk, there's just something that the person liked about my drawing or my writing. I don't dislike "fans" but it is not nearly so personal as people you can talk to about things.
Or listen to them talk about things but with some give and some take. I try to engage those people on those lists sometimes once in awhile. Some find that a turnoff and unfriend. You want to have a "friend" online, but without the baggage of conversation, thinking or trying to seek a common ground.
On the other hand, some of the people who are "fans" have also provided actual support sort of in various ways over the years. People who tell me hey, your ideas aren't crap, don't give up, do keep working on things. Or the occasional brutally honest person who goes "here, this is what you are doing wrong, and that's why it's pissing people off" but isn't doing it to be a douche or make you upset, and actually does suggest some stuff to try instead or point you in the right direction.
And no, that doesn't mean stop doing the things that you are good at, or being interested in the things you are interested in because yes, there are some people who will choose to dislike you based on the certainty you have with knowing what you like and don't and even just that you enjoy what you do for a living. Don't ask me why, but those make a very strange portion of haters.
Now as I sit here and watch, as every single online website attempts to milk social media for all that it's worth and "tap into this new hot thing" as more and more sites integrate the social media into it to try and "bring our information in a relevant way to the people who like to use those" I am understandably a bit frustrated. Who gave them permission to bastardize the quality of information and decided the users of this or that, call it social web 2.0+, were the golden standard and everybody else deserves neglect &/or abuse?
It is not a bad thing to go looking around for interesting things online. I suppose they want the Internet to be a bit more like television but with less control. I am going to wake up one day to find I cannot search for something but based on a list gathered of things I am interested in and the types of people I have talked to, and the kinds and number of other clubs and websites I have registered to, I am supposed to be interested in some things (with highly belligerent targeted advertising) that are only on that list. The whole human element of me deciding what it is I am to be interested in has been usurped from autonomous control to control... by some sort of automaton. Ironic.
I don't want everything to be decided for me particularly what kind of information I am supposed to be interested in. That is the biggest philosophical insult to an inquiring mind in a way. Supremely limiting, especially since the target demographic sampled from tends to be airheads, then you get this self feeding repeat loop which downregulates quality and insists you shall like the same stupid things as large chunks of everybody else, due to a "wisdom of crowds."
I hand pick myself, my friends and I ... we hand pick things we thought were interesting and email them to each other or link them in a chat room. I refuse to do part in the great game and let a piggybacking parasitical other trend hunter somehow get capital or profit off of what is in that regard sort of a transient intellectual property though never technically belonging to any of the entities involved but with negligible benefit to the people who they are observing. This is sort of an aggressive lazy way of milking everybody else's quintessence for personal profit, no?*
Now I do appreciate a clever ad though.
why are we taking the gold of the Internet... and just serving it up on a hot steaming silver platter to the very basest users?
Call me old fashioned but I'm more interested in websites that have cool stuff on them or have really good quality information than in how popular a website is or how many people like it on a social news aggregator.
I would much rather build friendships and such myself, be they traditional or long distance. So you can take all this sorting and categorizing of people as the lazy man's way out which everybody trumpets and shove it.
Being willing to actually think does get lonely sometimes though.
But it isn't about following the trends so that other people like you. To me, this has become such an over encompassing part of our lives it has reduced the depth of people's personalities.
They don't like you for you, they like you for your stuff!
Anything that can't be marketed we are trained to deride or chastize as useless. Useless for whom though?
What our country needs right now are some makers, doers and thinkers.
I look for depth, look hard, try to find meaning only to watch as what was once good gets mangled beyond recognition into something not quite as good but somehow cleverly pitched as being better than the original so that people who are lazier can pretend at competency while attacking those who spent time and effort training to become skilled or knowledgeable in something.
*Who actually likes "auto-suggestion" of contacts?
What the hell was everybody thinking???
Also, as pages get cluttered with comment space that puts priority emphasis on users of social network sites rating how cool or dumb they think something is... I wonder if this will have a negative trade off that reduces the opportunity to allow people to decide for themselves whether they like/dislike a video clip, an online game, an article, etc. I suppose those who are most easily influenced by the crowd would be influenced by that sort of thing anyway but it is a bit of an annoyance.
No comments:
Post a Comment