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Thursday, April 9, 2009

Facebook

Facebook growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

On Facebook, there's a new way you communicate - through the stream. Every time you log into your home page you see a running timeline or stream of the information being shared by your friends and the other things you're connected with. The more people share, the more you see in the stream and the more you learn about your connections. This stream doesn't have a reciprocal /direct way of communication. When you interact with a story in the stream, commenting on a piece of conntent you liked, the person sharing it becomes part of your active network.

Facebook management is acting like a group of cult leaders intent on changing the rest of us into more social, less private people than we might want to be ... Isn't there a lot more to human connection than one liner status updates, photos posted online, "thumbs up" and the other relatively mechanistic interactions that people have on Facebook? What's the end result of all these magical connections through relatively shallow communication? Advertising! ... That's the highlight of all this - formerly free-thinking individuals [using] Facebook to turn themselves into players in an advertisement.

One important question is whether we will have a much more radically distributed capacity to create knowledge, information and culture, and participate in the creation of knowledge, information and culture, or whether we will have a replicated and only slightly different industrial structure to information and knowledge production. We are now in a much more permeable and fluid society and a much more permeable cultural environment where the difference between producers and consumers is much more blurred.

Human beings are also undergoing transmutations into electronic avatars on the realtime social network; therefore the ability to automatically track and analyze their "movements" and "relationships" becomes an increasingly attractive value-mining opportunity. This opportunity exists today, but what's required to exploit it is the connection of the rich data collected on avatars' activities with data collected on various salient economic variables. Such a connection of datasets would allow much more precise estimates of the economic value of, for example, "friends" and "followers" in the context of both consumer markets and labor markets and, in turn, the ability to better measure, incentivize, and in general manipulate interactions on the so-called social graph.

But the mayor treat these kind of social network present is preventing human beings from becoming fully developed: A computer is a logical machine; our human brain has both a logical and a creative and/or emotional side. If we unduly stimulate the logical side and deprive the creative-emotional side (or the converse) the deprived functions atrophy. That influences our personality. We should try not to become a binary person; otherwise we will loose some of the valuable resources we have (like the ability to write a poem), our social skills will deteriorate and probably our human friends will vanish.

8 comments:

Uncle Tree said...

All work and no play
makes Tree want to
leave the grounds.

Too shallow.

.

Influences, period.

"Know thyself." And then we have,
"You'll get used to it."
One of those have to be in the
wrong, right?
We know what the truest of artist would choose. There is the danger of losing one's better self in a crowd. How much (I love this word) integrity must one have before one can afford to mingle with the most fashionable? One really must also know what one wants, because that's definitely what comes next.

Compromise? B.S.!
Pressure from coin is one thing, pressure from the want of achievement is another. Masters are born, not made. I, myself, feel the deep repulsion in my gut, not my head, and so I still have to wonder who's in charge. And if I knew, I'd most like feel sorry for them.

julio said...

101011100010101010

cai con twitter xD

R101 said...

As usual, human real world –indeed a bendition– appears to be much, very much more incrackeable (must be to said, intractable?), and the posibility that a social network was converted in a data mining co. is overpassed by a simple and hidden structure: the unconciuos

Mariana Soffer said...

r101: impossible to crack? Have to think about the unconscious

alfredo:it is 1110000101

Uncle: first, I loved you poem. It has magic words. Also the phrase
"Know thyself." And then we have,
"You'll get used to it."
I might be darkish today, but I have the feeling you are expecting to much from people such us knowing what they want, and holding on to their integrity, they seem to be such a hard tasks.

Mariana Soffer said...

Quoting someone I like: "More than ever, I want to be mechanical. Be machine. Be microprocessor and run speed and whirr and compute. I want to fuck up your head with strings of randomly impenetrable code and mine too, mine too. I want the sky blue sky to be blue screen of death and ‘Abort, Retry, Fail?’ Abort. Definitely. I can be your meaningless abortion. And smile. And breathe. Oh darling, you say the sweetest things. Rosebud, my petal, my only true one. But now I need to switch off and shut down. Shut down. Are you sure? Y/N"

Fantasia said...

Devils advocate. Via Facebook I have reconnected with people I would never have found again. I have since then traveled to Doha, The Philippines, France, Australia and Grand Cayman to visit these friends - spending face to face quality time.

Don't hate the tool for reflecting the sad fact that many humans do not wish to reach out and "touch someone". Facebook is only a tool - a mirror.

AS with all things it is what you choose to do with it that speaks volumes.

Mariana Soffer said...

You are right

"If you want to do evil, science and technology provide the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, sci-tech puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so."
The trick is to want the right things, then sci-tech will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them. (they provides tools, amazing wonderfull tools, but they are still mere tools).

You can use a stick to pick food for you family, or you can use it to hit a member of your family. It all depends on the use you give it to. Things are neither good nor bad.

I never thought about it but facebook can be like a mirror, well this will be a hole other discussion. Which I am willing to have (after I finish working)

Thank you very much for your coments fantasia
M

Mariana Soffer said...

Hei Fantasia, you might like to read this:
http://singyourownlullaby.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-interaction.html
http://singyourownlullaby.blogspot.com/2009/03/social-networks.html

now I am going to check you web, I am curious about the content.

Take care