I was chatting with a friend the other day - and we wonder, is Facebook now what Solitaire used to be? That compulsive, obsessive thing you do to numb your senses so you don't have to really think or get off your butt to finish work you need to do?
Or is it like a Pavlovian response....you are the rat that is trained to hit a lever over and over and over and every once in a while the rat gets something yummy to eat. When I read Facebook my eyes slide over post after post of drudgery ("Sick...snot flowing..." "Black bean soup and club sandwich for lunch!" "We are so proud of our little Jimmy - he pooped on the potty today" and then ONCE in a rare moon something that you chuckle at, cry over or changes how you see the world.
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Kinda. Your analysis is an oversimplification.
ReplyDeleteThere are tons, and I mean TONS for people who do FB simply for the applications, i.e., games.
Separate from that, Facebook is social media, so in a sense it is chat, both delayed and real-time, with some fancy features.
But more specifically, FB lets people by-pass top-down models of information flow by creating a decentralized communications network. This is empowering and addictive. The fact that you are reading about snot and poop is your problem, not the publishers of the content. You need to work on your filter. Part of that, of course, is FB's problem for only giving you the bare-bones basic filter support.
huh?
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