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I noticed this trend some years ago, to my own despair. I first
noticed it in the way, month by month, the quality of many mailing
list discussions deteriorated and then fell mostly silent. I noticed
it in how I encountered increasingly vitriolic responses to posts on
any topic that exceeded more than a single paragraph. The act of
reading was becoming an ever-worsening imposition, making coherent
on-line discussion increasingly difficult. In space advocacy forums,
people would complain about how no one ever presented any 'plans'
for doing anything then, when those plans were posted, those same
people would complain about being expected to read them--like you
were supposed to reduce every highly technical discussion to a
bullet list. <br>
<br>
Increasingly, mailing list based groups moved to Facebook pages on
the premise that this was now where all the people were, which was
true, but when my own forums went there I cautioned that the mode of
use compelled by the Facebook interface was tailored to mobile
devices and didn't allow for any form of coherent discussion. You
could see this in how crude its text editing was, and how quickly
you hit the wall in character count. It was a 'browsing' platform--a
form originating in bulletin board and news aggregator sites--prone
to what I call 'browser's syndrome'; a cyclic scanning of 'news' in
small chunks that creates a sort of hypnotic state which is
disrupted by text that compels active conscious thought. It's a way
of coping with an overwhelming volume of information by applying a
kind of compartmentalization and rhythm to its assimilation. In
effect, when people seemed to act compulsively angrily at any long
post it was because they were responding to it the way a commuter
does when encountering a traffic jam. It breaks the rhythm of the
browsing routine. Disrupts the flow. Demands attention when people
really want that steady thought-quelling rhythm of news-bytes, like
the rocking of a cradle, or maybe the drum beat of the hortator... I
worried that a lot of these groups would be killed by going to
Facebook, their subject matter too sophisticated for such structure,
and I was proved right. But what could you do? Facebook had all the
eyeballs and it didn't so much shape the trend as conform to it.
Personal computing itself was shifting from big screens to small.
The ergonomics of reading was being changed to suit. <br>
<br>
Facebook's appeal rests in the still intractable problem of the
internet's vast scale and 'structurelessness', which relates to the
limitations of the search engine to function as a coherent internet
front-end. Facebook sort of crudely solves today the problem the
Semantic Web is intended to solve some time in the future--and which
used to be characterized by past futurists in the idea of the
'personalized electronic daily newspaper'. I used to describe UNIX
as being like visiting Tokyo during a blackout--having to navigate a
vast city by flashlight. This is pretty-much what the Internet has
long been like; passive, invisible, waiting for you to make some
effort to go in and explore it with some collection of tools like a
spelunker. You can't really do anything useful with, or get benefit
from, the internet until you've established a kind of sub-net of
your own into it that you can navigate, more-or-less, in a routine.
This is what the features of web browsers were, crudely, about;
creating default entry points into the net, giving you a memory of
frequently used locations. News aggregators, like Reddit, emerged as
a means to pool effort into making the internet more visible through
a sort of centralized community window organized by topics,
replacing the flashlight with a spotlight. As these became larger
they became a kind of push-information front-end to the newest
information on-line that you could brows like a newspaper. Facebook
offers a kind of personalized push-info view into a certain portion
of the internet--albeit rather crude. That personal electronic
newspaper spit out of your combination toaster/coffeemaker/computer.
You could argue it's what the web browser itself was really supposed
to evolve into but didn't. Recently, analysts have discovered that,
in many countries, large numbers of people can't tell the difference
between the internet and Facebook because they don't really
understand the relationship between the two. They will deny being
'internet users' while being avid Facebook users. They think they're
two completely different things; the internet a 'computer thing' and
Facebook what you use on a smartphone. Facebook has become a kind of
Windows OS over the Internet (often, people's first interaction with
it), with people no longer cognizant there's still something like
DOS underneath. <br>
<br>
Facebook may command the biggest mainstream mass of eyeballs, but
it's a fundamentally inadequate communication medium and I think
that will succumb to other media concepts in time. We're in a phase
now where real competitors haven't yet been invented because
developers of alternatives are still reacting to its scale and
'corporateness' rather than its form and structural and functional
inadequacies as a communications medium. The form itself is not yet
getting questioned. It's who's running it that people object to. The
ironic thing about Facebook is that, for a social media platform,
it's not really very much about social communication. It's really
more of a short-form news/blog aggregator. It's still just another
kind of bulletin board. <br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/22/15 10:02 AM,
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:p2p-foundation-request@lists.ourproject.org">p2p-foundation-request@lists.ourproject.org</a> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:mailman.2940.1424624553.6975.p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org"
type="cite"><font size="-1">
<div>Death by Ten Billion Status Updates</div>
<h1>How Facebook Killed the Internet</h1>
<div>by DAVID ROVICS</div>
<div>
<p>Facebook killed the internet, and I�m pretty sure that the
vast majority of people didn�t even notice.</p>
<p>I can see the look on many of your faces, and hear the
thoughts.��<i>Someone�s complaining about Facebook again.�
Yes, I know it�s a massive corporation, but it�s the
platform we�re all using.� It�s like complaining about
Starbucks.� After all the independent cafes have been
driven out of town and you�re an espresso addict, what to
do?� What do you mean �killed�?� What was killed?</i></p>
<p>I�ll try to explain.� I�ll start by saying that I don�t
know what the solution is.� But I think any solution has to
start with solidly identifying the nature of the problem.</p>
<p>First of all, Facebook killed the internet, but if it
wasn�t Facebook, it would have been something else.� The
evolution of social media was probably as inevitable as the
development of cell phones that could surf the internet.� It
was the natural direction for the internet to go in.</p>
<p>Which is why it�s so especially disturbing.� Because the
solution is not Znet or Ello.� The solution is not better
social media, better algorithms, or social media run by a
nonprofit rather than a multibillion-dollar corporation.�
Just as the solution to the social alienation caused by
everybody having their own private car is not more electric
vehicles.� Just as the solution to the social alienation
caused by everyone having their own cell phone to stare at
is not a collectively-owned phone company.</p>
<p>Many people from the grassroots to the elites are thrilled
about the social media phenomenon.� Surely some of the few
people who will read this are among them.� We throw around
phrases like �Facebook revolution� and we hail these new
internet platforms that are bringing people together all
over the world.� And I�m not suggesting they don�t have
their various bright sides.� Nor am I suggesting you should
stop using social media platforms, including Facebook.� That
would be like telling someone in Texas they should bike to
work, when the whole infrastructure of every city in the
state is built for sports utility vehicles.</p>
</div>
</font></blockquote>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Eric Hunting
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com">erichunting@gmail.com</a></pre>
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