[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.