Slashdot Mirror
Social Sites Offer 'New' Way To Experience Presidential Debates
News.com notes that the social sites have been burning up in the wake of the debates, as users create more content than it's possible to follow. Facebook specifically set up an area for debate viewers to post messages and take surveys during the events. Some participants found it a bit worthless, and the article refers to the experience as 'information overload'. "No doubt, the political twitterers must've felt empowered to know their Soundboard comments were being beamed out to an audience of potentially millions of Facebook users, and, if plucked by ABC's designated Facebook-monitoring reporter on TV, millions of offline viewers as well. Still, it's a little unclear whether the comments will prove all that useful for campaigns looking to boost their candidates' standing."
At Christmas I was talking to my grandfather about the 1930s. He was mentioning how much American politiking has changed since then. In particular, he talked about how the candidates then didn't have the huge teams that they do today. The politicians themselves did much of the grunt work, and interacted directly with the voters.
One thing he said is that it made the politicians seem more real. These days, a normal American citizen would have very little chance of meeting face-to-face with their representatives, especially at the higher levels of government. But in those days, such meetings were quite easy to arrange, especially before an election. He recalled meeting with one candidate for office. During their meeting, the candidate got a bad case of diarrhea. He told me grandfather straight out, "I'm about to shit my pants full of liquid. Excuse me." So my grandfather did, and was so impressed by this candidate's honesty that he voted for him.
I just don't think we'll ever see something like that from a politician today. And with YouTube being an outlet for embarassing videos, politicians today seem less likely than ever to appear at non-scripted events.
Facebookers opined that Hillary Clinton is "onto Barack like a Rottweiler" one moment and "has about as much experience and common sense as an avacado [sic]" the next. Ron Paul is a "looney" to some, but "the only one who understands economics" and "the only logical and realistic choice," to others.
So, put it that way, people say anything and its opposite about candidates, and we hardly have any way to quantify what they think as a whole. So we can (pretty much) qualify what people think but not quantify. Sounds like a problem.
Here's what I wish would exist on the web, sort of polls in which no poll choices would be defined by the poll creator, but would emerge from what people say. I'm going to use TFA's Mitt Romney example to illustrate the idea : "Mitt Romney, who arguably endured the largest share of attacks during the Republican debate, drew mixed reviews: everything from "the only one who understands insurance," "looks younger than 60," to "is getting creamed," and "lost this debate.""
Basically, from such a polling system's user input would emerge dominating trends, for example "Only Romney understands insurance", "Romney lost the debate", "Romney looks young", and people's input would be categorised under these self-grouping ideas and thus you could both qualify and quantify at the same time what people think and agree on.
Unfortunately the "grouping user input into a few categories" thing might be the difficult part.
You just got troll'd!
What percentage of the MySpace, Facebook and YouTube audience are old enough to actually vote? My guess is the answer to both these questions are relatively low numbers.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but most of my family (all adults) have Facebook accounts and keep bugging me to create one since it's how they keep in touch these days.
My mother also recently went on her first date in years. It was an ex-high-school-boyfriend that she hadn't seen in 30 years who had run across her Facebook profile.
Both are reasons that I *don't* have a Facebook account but pretty much everyone I know seems to have one these days it seems.
facebook is (used to be?) mostly college students, eg, those who are old enough to vote.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I noticed the new "Debate" feature on Facebook the other day and decided to take a look. In my opinion, this feature would be a lot more useful if it had been released two or three years ago when Facebook was just college students and the level of discourse was much more civilized. Now that Facebook is open to anyone, the debate goes to the lowest common denominator, so it's about as much fun as reading Youtube comments.
You don't have a facebook account because you don't like keeping in touch with your family?
:)
And should you ever become a widower or divorced you never want to go on dates again? Especially not with someone you knew.
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I WAS able to get my family on board. I've been trying for a while to setup a portal where we could all post pictures or keep in touch. 8 kids and 12 grandkids and 5 (so far) great-great grankids under my late grandmother. All a relatively close knit family but didn't quite make it into the digital age. We don't have places to share picture, something that used to be done via postal mail or just the next time we got together.
Well could never talk them into my OSS portal. They didn't want to create an account, blah blah. Well since my mom saw me log into facebook she was more or less hooked. I showed her how to sign up. She uploaded some pictures with the java applet, tagged me ("Oh wow, this is so nice you can pick out who is in each picture!").
Since then she's added a college roommate some people from work. She loves it.
My family (adults) also have my limited profile
You don't have a facebook account because you don't like keeping in touch with your family?
Correct.
And should you ever become a widower or divorced you never want to go on dates again? Especially not with someone you knew.
Not that. I'm just not interested in having people from my past stumble upon public information of mine and hit me up. It happens every once in a while even without Facebook and it's always an unpleasant experience for me. I always feel obligated to exchange kind words and try to get some kind of ball rolling as if it was a crime that we fell out of touch to begin with, and I'm very rarely interested in actually becoming acquainted with those people again. If I ignore them or be honest I feel like an asshole. So I try to avoid the situation in the first place.
I have a MySpace account that I used mostly for business / promotional reasons but I let a bit of personal stuff flow in. It's been ages since I've even logged in. There's thousands of pending friend requests and messages etc. that haven't been looked at. I just can't be bothered. I find social networking sites to be far too much of a drain. I prefer e-mail. Quick and to the point. In fact, e-mail is pretty much the only way I really like to communicate (besides face-to-face of course) at all. Every thing else (including phone) annoys the hell out of me (and no I do not own a cell phone).
http://www.aspiesforronpaul.com/
There seems to be a big misconception about how Facebook works that I keep seeing repeated by slashdotters that don't have it.
If you go to type in someones name that has *default settings*, if you're not in their network all it shows you is their face and name and what network they are on. (A network was originally a 'college', but has since been expanded to "Work" and "Regional"). From there the privacy settings are very very customizable.
I can make it so NO ONE can find me in search. More or less invisible and I have to add friends. I can make it so only 1 network (Say my college network) can see my drunken bar photos while only my Work network can see me helping old ladies across the street. I can put people on a limited profile so that crazy stalker girl I can add as a friend and not have her see my phone number. But just because someone can find you on search doesn't mean they get ANY of your personal information and even then you can limit it.
It's really very flexible.
I don't see why everyone is up in arms about facebook 'privacy' concerns . So Facebook knows my name and movies. I don't care. I'd rather have them try and push a new ad to a movie I'd like than a chick flick. And until I start putting in either financial information and SSN, I really don't care if they store the passwords in plain text.
I'm guessing you also don't pay much attention to maxi-pad or home pregnancy test ads. There's a reason the word "Demographics" exists. Everyone on slashdot (and I'm not saying you) seems to think that because THEY do or don't do something that EVERYONE must think the way they do. If you don't like social networks fine. There are plenty of us who do. Just like there are plenty of us who prefer Debian over Ubuntu and OS X over XP.
I think that you need to not trust everything you read on or about the Internets.