Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Follow me on Twitter as ssevener
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Follow me on Twitter as ssevener
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Follow me on Twitter as ssevener
After writing this, I realized that I think I hit on something with that last point – how much of the younger generations even read newspapers anymore, at least in the traditional sense??? If it’s such a low number that it’s inversely proportional to the amount who use DVRs, then maybe that’s the key – newspapers cater to their audience, who really aren’t using DVRs, anyways. Kind of like the concept that the average age in Congress is something like 64 years-old … a sad reality for the current time, but eventually there will need to be a shift or the whole thing will just die with them. Hell, a lot of people in my generation would cite that newspapers are already dead anyways, so maybe I need to just stop nursing them along and catch up with my own people… 🙂
So this has been happening to me a lot lately, specifically with The Celebrity Apprentice. We don’t watch the show live – we almost always watch a night or two later, and inevitably the last couple of weeks, I’ve known who got fired before ever watching the actual episode, whether via a headline in a paper’s RSS feed or even right on the damn cover of our local free daily. Needless to say, I’ve been more than a little pissed about it…
…because here’s what I think is interesting – I don’t really follow a lot of “traditional media,” but they’re the ones who still seem to be at the root of my problem here. I’m not reading on Facebook or Twitter who lost, I’m finding it in the newsfeeds of the only actual “newspaper” that I still read (our local one) or on the cover of the free daily paper that I pick up on the corner. It’s not on any of the blogs that I read, or even on digg.com – really, it’s only the print dinosaurs that are fucking this up for me!!!
And that’s why I’m wondering if this is mostly a generational problem – maybe us young’uns who grew up with the Internet understand the concepts of netiquette and spoilers, whereas the older guys are still pinned on their whatever grabs the readers’ attention-mentality to afford them another week of survival. Which in itself is amusing simply because I’m getting a lot closer to just turning them off altogether and getting my news from publishers who actually get that not everyone has had a chance to watch the season finale of American Idol just yet…
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Follow me on Twitter as ssevener
I thought of this, but couldn’t figure out where to fit it into the previous multi-post Facebook diatribe, but another thing that I personally really like Facebook for is vaguely keeping up with people from my past.
Explanation: My argument for not really giving a shit about my high school reunion was always that for the people who I really cared about, I would continue to stay in touch with anyways … and for the most part this has remained more or less true. On the other hand, the main reason to go to a reunion isn’t to catch up with your best friends, but to see how everyone else managed to turn out – who had kids, who’s living where, who’s doing what, and so forth…
I like Facebook for this reason because I can be friends with someone and see random updates from their life without actually having to get really invested to hear the entire story, and that might sound kind of crude, but face it, it’s realistic because think of how many of your Facebook friends you’ve actually talked to on the phone or in person recently. For me, it’s almost none because sometimes I can barely find the time to call my closest of friends, so to keep up with a few dozen people that I went to school with or the guys I worked with at summer camp, for example, would just require way too much phone time and frankly, between my scheduling and theirs, it would probably never happen.
But nonetheless, I’ve been able to reconnect, at least somewhat, with a lot of those people via Facebook because even if I still never really talk to them, at least now I know that Dave married Jenna and is living in Texas with their kids or that Terry lives out on the west coast and still plays in a band, and so on. Basically, Facebook has taken the place of the reunion for me, except that it’s updated all of the time and probably gives me a lot more information than I would ever get from a couple of dozen five minute conversations once every ten years. We may not be as close of friends anymore, but I’m still curious about what’s going on in their lives from time to time, and for me, Facebook fulfills that need very well.
The only thing that it doesn’t give me is the dirt about the people who I didn’t like – who knocked up who and what kinds of crappy jobs that they’re doing now – but that’s just because I refuse to friend people who I truly hated growing up. As much as I’d love to confirm that the guy who used to shove me into my locker every day freshmen year is now shoveling shit somewhere, friend just doesn’t seem like the appropriate word!
Maybe nosy acquaintance who really wants to gloat, but certainly not friend…
I found myself agreeing with a lot of the points from this Diggnation clip where Kevin and Alex give their feedback on a recent article alleging 10 Reasons Why YOU Should Quit Facebook . Kevin provides a unique perspective as the CEO of another large social networking site and he hits on a lot of good points that actually make sense if you peel back the pure “corporations are evil” layer and actually try to look at it from the angle of someone trying to grow a business…
http://revision3.com/diggnation/facebook/top-10-reasons-why-you-should-quit-facebook
I guess the funny thing is, the more I hear everyone complaining about all of Facebook’s privacy blunders, the biggest threat that always gets thrown around is, “Well I’ll just stop using it – Facebook’s not all that great…” and maybe I don’t know exactly how they’re using it, but from my own perspective, believe it or not I’d actually disagree.
The reason for this is that sure, I’ve had an online presence for a long time. I’ve written a blog since 2003, I’ve ran websites featuring my writing since 1999, and even maintained groups on telnet systems before that. Add Twitter on top of everything and there’s certainly no shortage of me online, but here’s the thing – not everyone is like me. In fact, the vast majority of my friends and family aren’t, but Facebook changed all of that. Most of my friends would never actually maintain a blog or even get into something like Twitter, but for some reason they’ll put random status updates up on Facebook when something interesting happens in their lives. And the same with photos – before Facebook (and admittedly MySpace), you pretty much had to sign up for a separate service like Flickr to post photos online, but now you can include those on your Facebook page, too.
So hands down, I think one of the huge benefits to Facebook is that they’ve created a conduit to create online presences for people who otherwise normally wouldn’t have one … which unfortunately is also somewhat of a burden because as these people are new to the concept of putting their lives online, unfortunately they’re kind of stupid as far as knowing what they should and shouldn’t be concerned about posting. Also a factor is the concern about what you consider private – I distinctly remember a scene a few years back when some of my family was shocked that you could type my Grandparents’ address into Google Maps and see their house pinpointed on a map, even though technically anyone with a phonebook and a road atlas could’ve done the same thing decades ago. It’s a perception of what could happen – are you concerned that someone knows what town you live in, or that they know what flavor of ice cream you ate last night because you threw up a post that said, “Mmmmmm – I love me some Chunky Monkey!”
I guess ultimately it’s a matter of educating this new crowd, and the trouble is, I’m not sure if that’s Facebook’s responsibility or someone else’s. I saw one rant the other day about how Facebook is deceiving when you join because of the lack of information on its homepage before you sign-up, which I think is a bunch of bullshit because the users still need to have some responsibility when they sign up. You don’t just randomly jump around to various sites, giving them your name and e-mail address because they asked for it … or your phone number, or home address, for that matter. You wouldn’t hand those out to just some random guy on the street, so why put them on your Facebook profile where you have a perceived level of privacy for the free service that you’re receiving??? Or do we just scold Facebook for soliciting that kind of data in the first place? The real trouble is, I have a feeling that people are getting bent out of shape about a lot more than just addresses and phone numbers, which tells me that ultimately they just want a private service … maybe someday Facebook will offer a private version that comes with a monthly subscription fee.
Oh wait – people have already protested paying $3.99/month for Facebook, despite those being nothing more than rumors!
I don’t know what else to say except don’t post it online unless you either don’t care about it being public or you’re paying somebody specifically to keep it private. Good grief, this became a much longer rant than I ever would’ve anticipated…
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Follow me on Twitter as ssevener