I woke up yesterday – OK, now it's last week – to the news that Facebook was scapegoating George Soros for the protests against its excesses. Was this a step too far? Is it time to leave Facebook?
I've been conferencing every since (well, and flying between) and have only eight minutes to write now (but then edited a bit 3 days later), but I want to rattle off why I haven't quit Facebook, at least not entirely.
I've had huge issues with Facebook since well before the elections and the formal breaking of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If you really know me, you know Twitter is my favourite social media, but I also use Google+ and keep a LinkedIn account (just to keep up with people's new phone numbers.) So I did a number of experiments where I avoided Facebook for over a month, then posted the same content on twitter, Facebook, and Google+. There was just no comparison between the three platforms. Facebook gives by far a richer emotional support, but also in some arbitrary cases, the best technical advice – though sometimes the best answers came from Google+, rarely did they come from twitter, which surprised me given who I interact with there.
I think the issue is that people go to different platforms when they have different levels of both temporal and emotional engagement available, and needing placation.
Without Facebook, I also wouldn't have the insight into the present lives and minds of the small village where I grew up, African American middle-class lives (and their broader friend networks'), the Indian technocracy (that's due to one person from one wedding!) and many more. So many windows into not so much individual lives as discourses. Speaking of "discourses", also the discussion of leading humanities professors and their former students and various acolytes.
And my family. Even my spouse. I absolutely love the wit my spouse shows on Facebook.
I realise I should phone the rest of my family more, but it's hard. Time management is hard. NP-hard.
I used to think that people calling for nationalising Facebook were crazy, but now I'm less sure. Like government itself, this is a platform by which we coordinate information. Even if it is horribly corrupted, even if it is killing people at home and abroad, maybe our job is to fix it, not to eliminate it.
But nevertheless, surely we have to respond in some way to the string of abuse and disrespect this company has been generating with its deliberated policies. For me, right now, I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense for me to drive traffic to it by creating public posts on the platform. I started doing that — reluctantly — just a few years ago, and I know from my blogger stats that many people only read my blogposts through that entry point. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to post my most recent previous blogpost there. Perhaps I will post this one publicly. But from there, I think I will only be using Facebook for my actual friends, until at least we can make substantial reforms there.
I've been conferencing every since (well, and flying between) and have only eight minutes to write now (but then edited a bit 3 days later), but I want to rattle off why I haven't quit Facebook, at least not entirely.
I've had huge issues with Facebook since well before the elections and the formal breaking of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If you really know me, you know Twitter is my favourite social media, but I also use Google+ and keep a LinkedIn account (just to keep up with people's new phone numbers.) So I did a number of experiments where I avoided Facebook for over a month, then posted the same content on twitter, Facebook, and Google+. There was just no comparison between the three platforms. Facebook gives by far a richer emotional support, but also in some arbitrary cases, the best technical advice – though sometimes the best answers came from Google+, rarely did they come from twitter, which surprised me given who I interact with there.
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| Yup, I played (and posted outcomes of) the game. Must be my openness. |
I realise I should phone the rest of my family more, but it's hard. Time management is hard. NP-hard.
I used to think that people calling for nationalising Facebook were crazy, but now I'm less sure. Like government itself, this is a platform by which we coordinate information. Even if it is horribly corrupted, even if it is killing people at home and abroad, maybe our job is to fix it, not to eliminate it.
But nevertheless, surely we have to respond in some way to the string of abuse and disrespect this company has been generating with its deliberated policies. For me, right now, I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense for me to drive traffic to it by creating public posts on the platform. I started doing that — reluctantly — just a few years ago, and I know from my blogger stats that many people only read my blogposts through that entry point. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to post my most recent previous blogpost there. Perhaps I will post this one publicly. But from there, I think I will only be using Facebook for my actual friends, until at least we can make substantial reforms there.
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