[peterwwillis]

For all of you wondering "Can I really give up Facebook?" the answer is an emphatic "Of course, stupid." You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.

The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite-all event listing.

Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.

Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.

[Karunamon]

>the answer is an emphatic "Of course, stupid."

Ignoring your patronizing, insulting tone for a bit, somehow I doubt it's that easy for most. If you're addicted to something (and I mean really, truly addicted), and it has negative consequences on your life, the answer is always "Well just stop it doing it, then". However, people do not work that way, and it's at the very least naive to assume it's that simple.

>You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.

Applies to Twitter, email, SMS, basically any communication method ever. The fact that becoming addicted to a communication medium can have a negative impact on your life is not a valid argument against said communication medium, because it applies to all of them.

>Facebook is not communication.

What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?

>replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology.

If you've never been emotionally impacted by a social interaction which did not occur with the person standing right next to you (i.e. via technology), I daresay you are either leading us on, or are not much of a communicator to begin with.

[peterwwillis]

Any bit of information can make an emotional impact, if it's meaningful to you. Maybe you learned that your whole family burned alive via morse code. Doesn't really matter how you got the information, you got it. And you'll probably have an emotional response. That isn't what i'm talking about at all.

I said replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. It's the removal of the human element that troubles me. When people stop reaching out to one another, and instead reach out to a plastic widget. When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly punching out comments on data streams, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction. Facebook is stripping away our humanity.

The simplest example is the occasional comment-box-flame-war you'll see when someone posts something about race, religion, sex, politics, etc. Total strangers haranguing your friends because they decided your status update's comment box was a nice place to have a pointless argument. It's made worse by the vagueries of the internet and the invincibility of the internet.

Email and text don't work the same way, and aren't a threat to human interaction in the way Facebook is. Twitter is similar, though, which is why I also deleted Twitter.

[Karunamon]

>When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly typing out replies to communication, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction.

You say "human courtesies", I (and others) say impediments to effective communication. Think of the average phone call. Think of how much of that is completely needless and only dictated by tradition as opposed to any real informational, emotional, communicative, or any other value.

And if you can't look past the medium to see the person on the other side, there's not a whole lot I can say on that. My BF on the phone vs Skype vs Facebook vs Twitter. It's all the same person, all their communique are special to me, medium regardless. In fact the textual ones have a benefit - I can easily retrieve those later.

Who really uses Facebook to the exclusion of meeting in person?

>Facebook is stripping away our humanity.

Such hyperbole.

>the negative consequences ("lack of pictures and status updates") are not nearly as broad as addiction to most other things in life.

You realize there is such a thing as mental addiction, yes? Your brain chemistry doesn't have to have been impacted by chemicals to be addicted to something.

[peterwwillis]

I'd like to continue this discussion but it's verging on pointlessness. I don't know how to describe the immense value that talking to someone has over making a comment on a status update.

I guess, try to imagine yourself in a state where you cannot move any part of your body but your eyes. Your body is slumped into a mattress for so long that there's a permanent dent in it. You can not hear, you can not talk, but luckily technology has progressed to such a state that you can project text through some technological medium onto a computer. Facebook is your only connection to the world you knew.

After years and years of existing in this state, one day you are miraculously cured. Do you think you would still find a phone call to be an impediment to communication at all? Maybe, maybe not, depending how comfortable you had become with your new world. But I know what would be important to me. I'll take a human conversation over text, every time.

[Karunamon]

I fail to see how this contrived situation applies to the majority of the world who are not paralyzed, deaf, and bedridden.

[zvrba]

> My BF on the phone vs Skype vs Facebook vs Twitter. It's all the same person,

Did you meet your BF through Facebook?

> In fact the textual ones have a benefit - I can easily retrieve those later.

Sorry, but this is creepy. The advantage of spoken word is that it's ephemeral, personal and unshareable with others; said things get forgotten and (if they were ugly), forgiven too.

[vijayr]

What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?

When one sends a email newsletter to 50K people, that is also communication. When one blogs, that is also communication. But these are not replacements for actual "conversations" which you have with one person at a time, or very small groups (2-3 people?) - which is very engaged, where everyone is interested in everyone else and emotionally involved.

Facebook news feed is like a giant scrolling billboard of "announcements" - sure it is communication in the sense our friends are telling us what they were upto - that is pretty much it.

May be I am wrong, but I think GP meant the difference between real conversations and broadcasting announcements.

[Karunamon]

>Facebook news feed is like a giant scrolling billboard of "announcements"

Agreed, but that is not Facebook's only function.

[btilly]

> > Facebook is not communication. > > What would you call it then!? It's a platform where > you share and talk with friends. How is that not > communication?

Facebook has the same relationship to communication that Doritos has to food.

[tomflack]

You're underestimating the worth of having literally all my friends using the same feature-rich messaging platform. I'm in China and using the opportunity to spend a little time away from western social platforms (not using a VPN) and the only thing I've missed is facebook messenger.

[pnathan]

There's a place for thin-band broadcast-based human interaction. Me, I think that's Twitter.

Facebook tries to pretend its more. Its not.

If I want to hold private dialogues with people from across the country - long, intense, and thoughtful - I prefer email.

[Wilya]

> The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event.

On the other hand, maybe you've missed a dozen of other events, where you could have had your share of "real" communication.

I despise Facebook as a company, and its many shady schemes, but I have to admit, it's a very efficient tool for connecting people.