Facebook/social media

take everything

This is without doubt the "social" age.
Just wanted to get opinions on the whole social media phenomenon and more broadly the "socialisation" of everything nowadays.
There is a lot about this that interests me.

Privacy vs publicity (i guess that's the term): Privacy seems to be fast becoming almost a quaint concept. There seems to be a constant pressure to divulge more and more. What are the merits of this.

Relationships: Deep, meaningful and few (reality) vs Superficial, usually meaningless and many (eg facebook). Again, what are the merits of each.

The value of popularity and how social media has amplified this.

What social media does for people: Psychologically (in terms of ego, sense of self). How social media kinda subverts the traditional celebrity hierarchical model (now everyone is a legend in their own lunchtime- and update us on their latest bowel movement :pac:). Ok the last bit is a bit facetious but hopefully you get what i'm saying.

People as product: ultimately people (and their data) are the product here. This ties in with the privacy thing. Google do the same thing i suppose. But again, the merits of this?

What is the future of social media. Is it here to stay or is it a fad?

Also, what are the real positive uses of social media
Anyway, thoughts.

looksee

Is this research for a project/thesis/paper? Its an interesting subject, but do you have any opinions?

patwicklow

Facebook is all about advertising and nothing else they now have hundreds of millions of people all different age brackets and its a marketing gold mine and the more people feed it with info the bigger it will get people are fools with out knowing it.

take everything

looksee wrote: »

Is this research for a project/thesis/paper? Its an interesting subject, but do you have any opinions?

No, it's not for a research paper.
Scepticism about most aspects of social media can be inferred from my OP (Yeah i know- that's tone).
No, i'm ambivalent and curious rather than opinionated about this.
Hopefully that reserve doesn't mean the thread has to close. Hopefully the aspects of social media i referred to are interesting enough to merit a thread.
I certainly find them interesting.

slowburner

take everything wrote: »

This is without doubt the "social" age.
Just wanted to get opinions on the whole social media phenomenon and more broadly the "socialisation" of everything nowadays.
There is a lot about this that interests me.

Privacy vs publicity (i guess that's the term): Privacy seems to be fast becoming almost a quaint concept. There seems to be a constant pressure to divulge more and more. What are the merits of this.

Relationships: Deep, meaningful and few (reality) vs Superficial, usually meaningless and many (eg facebook). Again, what are the merits of each.

The value of popularity and how social media has amplified this.

What social media does for people: Psychologically (in terms of ego, sense of self). How social media kinda subverts the traditional celebrity hierarchical model (now everyone is a legend in their own lunchtime- and update us on their latest bowel movement :pac:). Ok the last bit is a bit facetious but hopefully you get what i'm saying.

People as product: ultimately people (and their data) are the product here. This ties in with the privacy thing. Google do the same thing i suppose. But again, the merits of this?

What is the future of social media. Is it here to stay or is it a fad?

Also, what are the real positive uses of social media
Anyway, thoughts.

Social media are definitely here to stay, and they need careful, and critical analysis.
I think the fact that they are primarily used by younger people indicates a lot. Older folk (like me) probably don't have as much of a need for ego massage. Much of what I see on FB is ego massage. I think folks use FB to paint anodyne pictures of their lives.
How often do you see people posting on social media about negative events in their lives?
This is one of the ways that the social media change how we interact with others. They have established a new convention: that we must only communicate the wonderful things that are happening to us.
I don't know to what extent this new convention pervades real life, or if it is a good thing. My personal opinion is that it is not a good convention. I don't believe it is a healthy way to represent your life to others.

This is probably a massive subject really.
There are so many existing issues, present and future, to be looked at. Probably the most obvious one is how much do the social media (and by extension, others) actually know about you? How confident are we about our privacy?
Recently, I signed up to an academic site. The site asked me if I wanted to use a profile picture. I said no. When I completed the signing up process - lo and behold, up comes my FB profile picture.
I found that worrying.

Another worry is the lack of diversity or the tendency towards monopolies.
I think we have to bear in mind the old adage 'Absolute power, corrupts absolutely.'

looksee

take everything wrote: »

No, it's not for a research paper.
Scepticism about most aspects of social media can be inferred from my OP (Yeah i know- that's tone).
No, i'm ambivalent and curious rather than opinionated about this.
Hopefully that reserve doesn't mean the thread has to close. Hopefully the aspects of social media i referred to are interesting enough to merit a thread.
I certainly find them interesting.

Not my call, I am just a Joe Soap on here. Your original post read as though you had been taking notes in a lecture on what the next subject for research was, and not a great deal on your thinking on the subject.

Social media serve some useful purposes, but I don't like most of them and I think they may have a negative long term effect.

Cardinal Richelieu

I can't stand FB myself, I feel it breeds a certain falseness in people in the hope of gaining popularity. We all know the type, the ones that practically tell you their constipated to get attention. Also another negative side effect of FB and other social media sites is the number of affairs that have started due to people reconnecting with old classmates and friends.

We hear how sites like FB and Twitter are great at communicating social media campaigns but how many people actually pay attention to what they sign up for and just don't retweet or forward in the hope that it might boost their popularity? I lost count of the amount of times I chatted to people who joined FB groups or forwarded me links like the Kony Campaign and they hadn't a fig of an idea what the group or campaign is about. I hope that someone like Chris Morris of Brass Eye fame starts a false social media campaign to show what fools are on FB. My last point is that social media sites seems to have replaced what the "man down in the pub said". The amount of misinformation on local FB sites that I frequent can be staggering at times. But if anyone points out this, no longer a FB friend of that account.

take everything

Not my call, I am just a Joe Soap on here.

Of course. That was towards the mods here.

Your original post read as though you had been taking notes in a lecture on what the next subject for research was, and not a great deal on your thinking on the subject.

Jaysus.
I've told you this is no more than a reflection of my own interest in this. I could've written an opinionated rant on what i don't like about Social Media. I didn't want to do that. Instead i wanted to frame what i thought were important issues in relation to Social Media. and as i say, you can at least infer tone from my post.

I'm not a Social Media expert. I'm just interested. If you pushed me for my opinion, it would not be dissimilar to many of the other posts here so far ie not elaborately fleshed out (whether simply that's reserve or ignorance is incidental tbh- the thread isn't about me and my expressiveness of opinion), but interested.
What i'm hoping for is that people better informed/expert than me can contribute.

It's been a while since i've been to a lecture. And i've never been to one on Social Media. My synthesis above, you say, is lecture-like. Not bad for someone who has no education in this area. :pac: I'll work on my secondary reading.

slowburner

take everything wrote: »

Of course. That was towards the mods here.



Jaysus.
I've told you this is no more than a reflection of my own interest in this. I could've written an opinionated rant on what i don't like about Social Media. I didn't want to do that. Instead i wanted to frame what i thought were important issues in relation to Social Media. and as i say, you can at least infer tone from my post.

I'm not a Social Media expert. I'm just interested. If you pushed me for my opinion, it would not be dissimilar to many of the other posts here so far ie not elaborately fleshed out (whether simply that's reserve or ignorance is incidental tbh- the thread isn't about me and my expressiveness of opinion), but interested.
What i'm hoping for is that people better informed/expert than me can contribute.

It's been a while since i've been to a lecture. And i've never been to one on Social Media. My synthesis above, you say, is lecture-like. Not bad for someone who has no education in this area. :pac: I'll work on my secondary reading.

Thank you for bringing up the subject. It's well worth discussing.

amacachi

In my experience people seem to over-analyse some aspects of the effects of Facebook and the like on their life. A friend recently deactivated their Facebook and a couple of days later I was talking to her about it. Apparently everything feels so much more personable without it. They happened to go out more in the following couple of days than usual (I assume it's the usual thing students do of getting it out of their systems well ahead of exams before knuckling down) and I asked if they wouldn't have gone out if they were still on Facebook. The answer was, of course, yes. Also without Facebook to compare it to why would it feel more personable? In a few weeks when they have to stay in to study if they win a bet and stay off Facebook they'll end up just watching TV or something.

Long story short, in my opinion Social Media and the internet in general are the next in the long line of distractions that people have. Perhaps it's a slightly more powerful one but it's still is just that.

slowburner

Em, how do folks feel that Boards fits into this equation?

crackin_up

Facebook has its uses. It is a way of sharing ideas and thoughts with others. Like any social media out there it can be over used and abused. To that end then yes Boards is similar to Facebook in that it shares ideas. The difference is what some consider to be good topics to share with others. Personally I don’t need to see if someone is going to make a cup of tea, or what the score is in the match that I am watching. In my opinion sites like Facebook will always be around and be even more invasive then it is now. In a way Facebook has made people lazy to interact with people in the real world. This can only lead to more lazy people which leads to more use of social media. Could you imagine the world wide panic if Facebook went down for a week. I wonder if people would learn to talk to one another again.

BarackPyjama

Cardinal Richelieu wrote: »

We all know the type, the ones that practically tell you their constipated to get attention.

Don't know anyone like that. You should choose your friends more wisely.

Cardinal Richelieu wrote: »

Also another negative side effect of FB and other social media sites is the number of affairs that have started due to people reconnecting with old classmates and friends.

Yeah. I can hardly turn around without an old school friend who wants to steal me from my wife adding me as a friend on Facebook. It's endemic, I tell you! :rolleyes:

Cardinal Richelieu wrote: »

We hear how sites like FB and Twitter are great at communicating social media campaigns but how many people actually pay attention to what they sign up for and just don't retweet or forward in the hope that it might boost their popularity? I lost count of the amount of times I chatted to people who joined FB groups or forwarded me links like the Kony Campaign and they hadn't a fig of an idea what the group or campaign is about. I hope that someone like Chris Morris of Brass Eye fame starts a false social media campaign to show what fools are on FB.

I think you might be taking the whole thing too seriously.

Cardinal Richelieu wrote: »

My last point is that social media sites seems to have replaced what the "man down in the pub said". The amount of misinformation on local FB sites that I frequent can be staggering at times. But if anyone points out this, no longer a FB friend of that account.

Examples?

Folks - it is what it is. I think we all need to chill a bit. If you don't want to use it, don't. Hundreds of millions do though it seems. Looking down your nose at people who use Facebook, Twitter, etc. and trying to find some kind of massive conspiracy in the whole thing - well, you're an idiot. The fact of the matter is that they're large social networking websites that analyse the data you give them for the purposes of making billions in marketing revenue. You can cancel your account any time you like and choose to not use the site should you so wish.

Despite popular opinion, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to clone you from your DNA and Biz Stone doesn't want to call around to your house and rape your children.

Lighten up.

slowburner

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/

fly_agaric

BarackPyjama wrote: »

You can cancel your account any time you like and choose to not use the site should you so wish.

As an example of normalisation of social media, I've read (somewhere...) that employers are using it more and more as a tool in their recruitment processes - linkedin of course can act as an online cv/business card, facebook can be trawled to examine what people get up to outside work etc?

I wonder if the time will come when you be seen as a sort of freak or pariah if you've decided to opt out? (fwiw I have no social media accounts [unless login to post on this site is counted??]. Google has lots of info about me through gmail and search but it is not really "out there" on the public internet).

slowburner

fly_agaric wrote: »

As an example of normalisation of social media, I've read (somewhere...) that employers are using it more and more as a tool in their recruitment processes - linkedin of course can act as an online cv/business card, facebook can be trawled to examine what people get up to outside work etc?

I wonder if the time will come when you be seen as a sort of freak or pariah if you've decided to opt out? (fwiw I have no social media accounts [unless login to post on this site is counted??]. Google has lots of info about me through gmail and search but it is not really "out there" on the public internet).

Can we be sure of this?

Priori

By participating in social media, people are being encouraged more and more to "brand" themselves. Like a packet of soup on a supermarket shelf, but instead of a bar code we've got our url, and for ingredients we have 'likes' that constitute 'who we are'...

Our photos are like the ads we broadcast, the status updates the product blurb.

I was talking with a close friend the other day about how glad we both felt not to have had social networks available to us when we were in secondary school. We felt everything to be dominated by surface, appearance, superficiality, and Social Media would have intensified this further. Not having it there, in retrospect, feels like a shield.

batistuta9

slowburner wrote: »

Em, how do folks feel that Boards fits into this equation?

crackin_up wrote: »

In a way Facebook has made people lazy to interact with people in the real world. This can only lead to more lazy people which leads to more use of social media. Could you imagine the world wide panic if Facebook went down for a week. I wonder if people would learn to talk to one another again.

I think the point about FB/twitter or any of the social media sites that they've made people less sociable in the real world isn't true at all.

a lot of people on FB are posting photo's of nights out or being tagged in photos at some club/pub etc., people use these sites to talk to people who they know in the real world from school, college or who're their friends anyway. They'll still interact with these people in the real world and probably do interact with a lot of them regularly anyway.

going online has probably replaced sitting watching TV when someone is at home with nothing to do for the majority of people and FB etc. are popular sites. not that their the only type of contact the people who use them have with the outside world.

i would say that sites like boards.ie are more likely to have people that are not as active socially than FB for example, with boards and the likes they're more time consuming as their discussion based sites and reading threads etc. takes a lot more time than looking through the newsfeed on FB and also on these type of sites you can be whoever or whatever type of person you want all you have is a username