Planet Facebook
My 4-week experiment with Facebook has almost come to an end, so what have I learned? Well, a number of things. It may just be the small sample of people with whom I have contact but it seems posts are dominated by:
a) People posting overt promotion for their own books- these people rarely/ever look at your stuff but strangely expect you to ‘like’ their pages & get a bit shirty if you don’t .
b) People posting bumper-sticker wisdom- I’m not averse to thought-provoking aphorisms but after about 10 seconds, I was just screaming ‘write something original yourself’. Even memes are more creative than just posting daily, or in many cases several times a day, a little thought ‘to help you get through the day’. What did we do before such self-help culture took over? Oh yes, I remember, we thought for ourselves.
c) Animal photos- some are funny, some expose cruelty but overall they reflect lifestyles far too closely associated with looking & playing with pets rather than actually doing anything productive.
d) Genuine people, genuinely interested in human interaction, listening to each other & responding to each other without trying to sell each other anything- I was frankly shocked at how few of these there were.
These conclusions undoubtedly reflect my naivety about FB (& possibly human nature) but it cannot be a surprise that there seems to be a falling away of interest in FB, particularly amongst younger folk. The idea of FB as cool cannot survive the huge time suck it becomes due to being weighed down by posts a-c as described above. It’s a habit that’s easily formed & hard to break but the waste of many hours a day, simply looking for something worth responding to, makes FB a huge disappointment. It offers so much & yet delivers relatively little. Does it make people happy? I wonder. Walk down any high street now & try not to bump into people looking at their devices rather than looking their fellow human beings in the eye. I am a techno-Luddite but is this really progress?
a) People posting overt promotion for their own books- these people rarely/ever look at your stuff but strangely expect you to ‘like’ their pages & get a bit shirty if you don’t .
b) People posting bumper-sticker wisdom- I’m not averse to thought-provoking aphorisms but after about 10 seconds, I was just screaming ‘write something original yourself’. Even memes are more creative than just posting daily, or in many cases several times a day, a little thought ‘to help you get through the day’. What did we do before such self-help culture took over? Oh yes, I remember, we thought for ourselves.
c) Animal photos- some are funny, some expose cruelty but overall they reflect lifestyles far too closely associated with looking & playing with pets rather than actually doing anything productive.
d) Genuine people, genuinely interested in human interaction, listening to each other & responding to each other without trying to sell each other anything- I was frankly shocked at how few of these there were.
These conclusions undoubtedly reflect my naivety about FB (& possibly human nature) but it cannot be a surprise that there seems to be a falling away of interest in FB, particularly amongst younger folk. The idea of FB as cool cannot survive the huge time suck it becomes due to being weighed down by posts a-c as described above. It’s a habit that’s easily formed & hard to break but the waste of many hours a day, simply looking for something worth responding to, makes FB a huge disappointment. It offers so much & yet delivers relatively little. Does it make people happy? I wonder. Walk down any high street now & try not to bump into people looking at their devices rather than looking their fellow human beings in the eye. I am a techno-Luddite but is this really progress?
No comments have been added yet.
