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Former Facebook Employee Questions the Social Media Life
stevegee58 writes "The Washington Post published an interesting article about Facebook's employee #51, Katherine Losse. As an English major from Johns Hopkins, Losse wasn't the typical Facebook employee. But after starting in customer service, she later became Mark Zuckerberg's personal ghostwriter, penning blog posts in his name. The article traces Losse's growing disillusionment with social networking in general and Facebook in particular. After cashing out some FB stock, Losse resigned and moved to a rural West Texas town to get away from technology and focus on writing."
It sounds like she thought this was something of meaning but, imo, it's not. It's not even really social. From what I can see, it doesn't matter how many "friends" people have. They often don't chat to each other. They talk about themselves and hopefully get a lot of people telling them how awesome they are. That's probably because most people don't have real friends on facebook. It's a list of people that decided to friend them for no good reason or because they met once or twice. It's impossible to have 500 actual friends.
So most interactions on facebook aren't really socialising. That patting each other on the back (or blowing each other depending on how far you take it) and to be honest I think the days of geocities were more social. People made websites with interesting content that would spark conversation even if were just between you and the author via email. I'd genuoinely say the vast majority of content I see people posting on FB is no interesting, it's not remotely deep or thoughtful. it's shit like announcements that someone likes amazon. Well good for you, you're like 99% of the population.
I don't really like having an account which is reflected in the fact I don't use my own name or talk about myself. It's there basically to keep in touch with some people which unfortuantely think there is no other way to keep in contact on the internet and since they're family it's a bit more awkward to tell them to suck it up and use email like a normal person. Though I feel that day coming up pretty soon.
The more connected I'm forced to be, the more disconnected I wish I was. My job at a technology company forces me to be connected 24/7 for various reason. Sooner or later I'm going to retire very early and move to some small town in the Sierra Nevadas. I've come to learn that I hate the privacy walls that are being torn down by both business and government on the internet, and as it evolves past the Old West in to East Berlin, I hate the whole thing more and more.
It's a lot worse than you think! FTFA:
"Celebrities had found Marfa too. The town's beloved food truck, the Food Shark, has nearly 1,700 'Likes' on its Facebook page -- including ones from luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Tammy Wynette, and Willie Nelson."
According to Wikipedia Tammy Wynette died in 1998. Facebook was launched in February 2004.