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by jlujan
5001 days ago
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>it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences for things that otherwise would be extremely difficult to share. His rant doesn't touch this because that is the perceived value to individuals that facebook provides. Cannot really argue against that and I am glad people are able to use it like this. However, there is something in this "value" that bothers me and why I do not use facebook. From the facebook ad link at the beginning of his post: "We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human, get together, open up. Even if it's a small gesture, or a grand notion -- we wanted to express that huge range of connectivity and how we interact with each other," The ad does not show that. It shows people doing things together. It shows real people interacting in a physical world. It shows physical, tangible, things. Not pictures of things, or short quips and a link to an article or an emoticon. The feeling the ad tries to carry across to the viewer is the exact reason that facebook is a terrible medium to "connect" in the human sense. Lets compare it to Apple's FaceTime ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k). Not only is the product in almost every scene, but the ad shows exactly how it directly integrates and impacts peoples lives. The last scene with the sign language drives home the technology empowering humans to connect in an almost surreal new way. Another example is the Kodak Carousel scene from Mad Men (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus). How facebook goes from their Timeline ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPEPfJHfKU) to "Chairs are like Facebook" is incredible to me. The commonality in all of these is capturing intiment moments between individuals. That is where the value proposition falls down with facebook. There is no sense of intimacy in the communication channel. A photo of your mom and dad probably has a different value to you than to your other facebook friends. It has very little to do with the photo itself as the photo has no intrinsic value either. It is the memories and emotions tied to it. That is the extent of it. Your mom doesn't need you to like the photo. Your friends don't need to see your comment saying your dad looks like a dork in that sweater. I argue that the passive nature and resulting noise to signal ratio makes facebook insufficient to build real human connections. For these things, not sure how facebook is better than email... it is no where close to live voice or video chat. Having a billion people on it means nothing when you only really want to communicate with 50 of them on a regular basis and only 1-4 of them at a time. Everything else on facebook is just self absorption and ego. But I digress. His rant is really about how facebook is trying to make everything a part of its ecosystem. I can barely get older generations on email or MMS messaging let alone facebook. Trying to include facebook in every website serves no one but facebook and to what end? It definitely isn't user experience. Facebook is going the way of AOL as a ubiquitous term describing what the internet is and that is a scary thought. |
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We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human
We need tools and services to feel human? I know it's marketing speak but geez.