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I read a lifestyle advice article on my home feed on FaceBook that listed a few of my friends on top. It was from a credible source, the NYT, but not a section of the NYT I would have picked out myself. I had some thoughts about it and looked around trying to see how it got on my home feed--which friend it came through, with no luck. In fact, I really don't know if the friends listed on it had read the article or had negative or positive reactions to it. When I went back to my feed to look closer at this info, the article had disappeared. Granted, I am still a FaceBook novice, since I avoid posting there, and perhaps savvy old timers can track these things with ease, but I have my doubts. I don't know how this article really got to my home feed. And if a casual attempt to track it doesn't reveal these answers readily to me, then it probably doesn't reveal those answers to most FaceBook users. Most likely, the question does not even occur to many FB users.
My friends on Facebook are all very bright, liberal or progressive. My home feed is full of news articles filtered through opinion pieces, but it is often not clear if the opinion is from my friend or one of their friends or a more removed pundit. Though I agree with the anti-Trump, progressive point of view of most all of my FaceBook friends, I find the difficulty of tracking who is making the comments very troubling. It's no way to get your news or to discuss news, and it is so easy to game and to slip in bots. Today I saw friends perhaps passing on the complaints of progressive groups about changes FaceBook is making to its news dissemination process, though I am not certain this came with my friends' approval, but whatever changes FB makes, they will not be worse than how it currently works or solve these problems and make it better.
Why are smart people using FaceBook to discuss politics when attributions are so fast and loose there? Why have they left behind other forms of social media blogs (like dreamwidth and LJ) where what articles you pass on are ones you have clearly linked to with your own html links and where your words are published on your own blog? More importantly, why are smart people using FaceBook to get their news feeds instead of going directly to news and blog sites they trust? FaceBook obscures the pathways the articles take and the attribution of commentary. It's horrible.
Why put your trust in FaceBook? The convenience is not worth the power you give this one web source by depending on it.
So yes, this is another futile anti-FaceBook screed. The only reason I look at FB is because so many smart people have left our social media homes for that horrid interface, and many people I know from various walks of my life have made it their social media home. In the last year I have been clicking there more because it is the only website where they congregate, and I give thumbs up and heart emoji's, but its not a place I want to put my words, pics, and time. It's a good interface for advertising events--concerts, meet-ups, and book launches, and should be used for such. But I worry about so many smart friends using it as a newsfeed--and how little use it has for the kind of productive political discussion you can still have on blogs.
It's not the internet as a whole that is making our society more stupid--it's FaceBook prime and center, more than any other site. And if we don't want FB's diffusing of attributions and ways of giving room for bots to play, then we have the power of keeping it from being so ubiquitous by not making it a prime source for news and political discussion, if not personal posts.
FB is a wrong turn in the evolution of social networking blog interfaces.
Dreamwidth and LJ are still my prime internet homes and will continue to be, and I will keep hoping my friends will come to their senses and come back or migrate to other old style social networking blogs that foster better interaction and political thought. But I really hope most of all they will stop using it as a news aggregator--by the way it is set up, it can easily mislead you about who is recommending the articles that appear before you, and narrow instead of broaden your news sources in the process. What looks like convenience on FB wastes your time (and synapses) instead of saves it.
My friends on Facebook are all very bright, liberal or progressive. My home feed is full of news articles filtered through opinion pieces, but it is often not clear if the opinion is from my friend or one of their friends or a more removed pundit. Though I agree with the anti-Trump, progressive point of view of most all of my FaceBook friends, I find the difficulty of tracking who is making the comments very troubling. It's no way to get your news or to discuss news, and it is so easy to game and to slip in bots. Today I saw friends perhaps passing on the complaints of progressive groups about changes FaceBook is making to its news dissemination process, though I am not certain this came with my friends' approval, but whatever changes FB makes, they will not be worse than how it currently works or solve these problems and make it better.
Why are smart people using FaceBook to discuss politics when attributions are so fast and loose there? Why have they left behind other forms of social media blogs (like dreamwidth and LJ) where what articles you pass on are ones you have clearly linked to with your own html links and where your words are published on your own blog? More importantly, why are smart people using FaceBook to get their news feeds instead of going directly to news and blog sites they trust? FaceBook obscures the pathways the articles take and the attribution of commentary. It's horrible.
Why put your trust in FaceBook? The convenience is not worth the power you give this one web source by depending on it.
So yes, this is an
It's not the internet as a whole that is making our society more stupid--it's FaceBook prime and center, more than any other site. And if we don't want FB's diffusing of attributions and ways of giving room for bots to play, then we have the power of keeping it from being so ubiquitous by not making it a prime source for news and political discussion, if not personal posts.
FB is a wrong turn in the evolution of social networking blog interfaces.
Dreamwidth and LJ are still my prime internet homes and will continue to be, and I will keep hoping my friends will come to their senses and come back or migrate to other old style social networking blogs that foster better interaction and political thought. But I really hope most of all they will stop using it as a news aggregator--by the way it is set up, it can easily mislead you about who is recommending the articles that appear before you, and narrow instead of broaden your news sources in the process. What looks like convenience on FB wastes your time (and synapses) instead of saves it.
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