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by potatolicious
4981 days ago
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> "People had small groups of tight-nit friends with whom they shared REAL experiences." And yet, they still do. One thing I heavily dislike about the Facebook narrative is how it's portrayed as two mutually exclusive choices. Either you have hundreds of people who poke at each other in superficial ways or you have tight-knit circles. The reality is that people have both, and have always had both. Facebook has improved our connection to the extended-acquaintances circle, it hasn't taken away our close friends. |
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Things were a bit different in college, I guess, when only .edu email holders were on the site. I'm not sure if that's because it was a safe walled garden for students to be themselves online or if it was because I had a much higher ratio of close friends to extended relationships. Either way, as the site has grown and more Bosses and Grandmas have joined, normally complex people who interact with me differently than the Boss or Grandma were suddenly forced to act in a lowest common denominator way.
I'll admit that the reason I left Facebook (late 2009) had little to do with privacy or advertising and more to do with the fact that most of my friends stopped posting pictures and self-censored because both Grandma and the Boss might see it. If I wanted interesting human contact, Facebook was decreasingly the place to find it.
Anyway, my gripe about the Facebook narrative, in addition to the one you just brought up, is that Facebook is the de facto place to communicate with anyone. It's not. It may be the path of least resistance in communicating with those acquaintances, but there are hundreds of ways to get in touch with people now. Facebook's grasp of social interaction is less of a stranglehold and more of a thin curtain that people, for whatever reason, refuse to look behind.