From December of 2015:
Facebook is boring my ass off.
Don’t get me wrong —— I’m happily enthusiastic that the denizens of earth are more wired up together. And it has shown real-life political-social results: folks raise their iPhones and record footage and upload it and things that never would have hit the mainstream media end up changing the world.
It’s what I always wanted to see. It’s towards a more democratic and more participatory world and folks interact more over a much wider stretch and get connected and that’s great.
But…
It is, at least so far, VERY geared towards the short attention span.
Folks post short concise 27-word or 9-word opinions. Folks read them. It may not be compellingly obvious at first, but that means communication is VERY much geared towards exchanging short bursts with people who are already on your wavelength.
It is very poorly suited to coming back to a discussion you participated in last week. You can’t easily FIND the damn thing. Still worse if you merely read it and did NOT post to it but want to find it again and read what else people said.
Hell, you can’t even easily find GROUPS that you once joined. They get buried, if you have not been to them in weeks.
It is all “of the moment”.
It narrows us. We don’t have time to explain anything, and we know it, and so we only post what we think our friends will “get”. It’s “least common denominator” social politics. We soon end up cozied up only to the little cliques of people who think like us without having to spell any of it out.
I like old-school “message boards” better. Create a thread, give it a title, and post your original post. People respond on topic. (Or sometimes not, but bear with me here). The entire thread persists and can be found a decade and a half later by someone who wants to re-read exactly what you and that other person said about the relationship between abortion rights and personal freedoms. And they can find it. Threads have titles and posts can be searched for by content.
I don’t know why Facebook became THE PLACE other than critical mass —the sense that “this is where everyone else comes now, so sign up so you can particpate in what everyone else participates in”.
I hope that over time people will want to have more meaningful and substantive conversations.
Yeah. Here I am.