Tag Archives: Online Communities

Social Media and Me

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I had no idea what photo to choose for this post.

I had no idea what photo to choose for this post.

**since writing this, I have deleted my Google+ , twitter, and Pinterest accounts (and obviously stopped using Bufferapp, reddit, and digg). they just were not adding anything to my life. I did create a new tumblr blog called “Wasp & Pear” that I am still fine tuning. It appears that Tumblr is what facebook should have and could have been:  artistically creative instead of sinister.  Wasp & Pear will be getting push-feeds from my various places, plus content I find while I’m clicking around. It’s like a digest of what I ingest, internetly speaking**

It seems to bet getting to the point where I am losing interest in a lot of the internet.

I have deleted the Facebook app from my phone and really only check it once when I get home from the gym. I still post the daily blog post to it, but am considering even cutting that out at the end of the month. It seems like Facebook has really run it’s course. I have unfriended everyone who over-shares, argues, holds vastly different opinions/beliefs than mine, etc. I read things from people bragging that they have “friends of all beliefs and opinions,” but it is simply not true. These people are not their friends, they are people they are linked to on Facebook, they are not IRL friends. It is sad they do not understand that. Yes, I have deleted people because they have ‘liked’ things that either mean they are thoughtless idiots that like everything without thinking it through or they like things that means they cannot actually like/respect me (if you like Mars Hill Church, you cannot like me, if you like Paul Ryan, you cannot like me, simple fact). I do not have the interest in such internet hypocrisies. I am all-but deleting Facebook because I wish to continue to have a way to contact the people that are on my friends list, most of whom are either distant relatives and former schoolmates/coworkers. If there were an easy way to remove content I have already posted, I would probably ‘wipe’ it down to posts no older than one month. If you’re old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends, or you should. It’s the comment trolls that have ruined Facebook (and the entire internet actually. Why on earth do they allow comments on news stories? If a commenter had something relevant to add, they would have been quoted in the story.)

Do yourself a favor and avoid reading comments of any sort as much as possible, you will feel better about humans.

Obviously, I “chronicle what inspires me” at waldina.com and follow several wordpress hosted blogs. I am also utterly obsessed with brainpickings, letters of note, McSweeney’s, and lifehacker. They are smart, fascinating blogs that I read regularly (and you should too).  If you have a blog on the WordPress platform, you can add me to your reader, there is a RSS link on the right hand side, so you could really add me to any reader.

I tweet and ADN because I enjoy being able to quickly read news headlines and similar updates. I do not understand the desire for people (mostly some sort of self-described ‘coach’) to collect followers and then send out a constant flow of marketing tweets. No one cares and no one appreciates that shotgun approach. My tweets automatically self-destruct after seven days, I see no reason to keep stale tweets around. The media is designed to be of-the-now, so why archive old ones?  But now, I gave it up, I felt like I was requesting that companies try to sell me things.

I adore ADN because it is so tech-heavy and that is really what fascinates me, everyone on there is really smart. Plus, I got to be @spa.

Pinterest? Meh. I am more-or-less over it. It got better once I stopped following the people that were mistakenly using it as Picassa. Like I need to see all the photos of your kids on motorcycles? But unless I am planning a wedding (I am not), I do not really see myself looking at it regularly.  And clearly, I have deleted it.

LinkedIn has not found me a job yet, so I look at it as a required placeholder for that, but I will never submit updates of any kind to it. I will keep my information current, but it seems more like a public resume service than anything else.

Instagram is the best way to just drop a photo out there for whatever reason, I do not feel like it is as needy as posting it on Facebook. I like the filters and I like being able to snap a photo with my phone, play around with the colors and share it.

What is not to like about Words With Friends? I am usually in about four games with different friends and I am usually losing three of them. I am not sure why they continue to play with me, I guess they like winning. I like trying.

Don’t get me wrong, I am no Luddite, I adore technology, newness, convenience, and the amazing things that creative people have been able to create. I even have an IFTTT recipe set up to email me an invite when new start-ups are featured on betali.st. I am excited about the possibilities.

In conclusion (you can click on the hyper links to follow me:

  • Facebook: Over it.
  • Twitter: News headlines, etc. (DELETED)
  • ADN: Smartest people on social media.
  • Pinterest: Ya, I guess I can look at your garden inspiration photo collection. (DELETED)
  • LinkedIn: I would like it more if it worked better for me, it is really designed for professional networking.
  • Instagram: Keep posting photos of stuff you see on the street.
  • Words With Friends: My ass gets kicked regularly.
  • waldina.com:  I chronicle what inspires me and will continue to do so.  I like the blogs I follow and hope to find more.
  • Wasp & Pear:  Bloggers on Tumblr are very very hip.  It’s like you have walked into a party and everyone is talking about art, architecture and film and no one has even mentioned what they do for a living.
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Hey Thanks.

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I didn’t have a picture of pilgrims, but I had a picture of pills.

 

Since a large portion of us still remember getting our first cordless home phone, and testing it’s boundaries by walking as far away from the base station as we could (ours worked all the way to the mailbox), it is understandable that we can get annoyed from time to time with how constantly connected we are now.   I do not need to know everything going on in everyone that I follow/friend always now, right now, 3 seconds ago.  The ever-so-slightly younger generations are used to this level of connectivity and do not find the minutia exhausting, it is kind of like an advanced filter or just plain old ADD, but they have managed to deal with the constant updates.  This is why I am thankful for these little helpers:

Nutshellmail sends an email of everything that’s happened on Twitter, FB and Linkedin since the previous message. It cuts off at a given point which you can set, so you won’t get everything. But you don’t need to see every post. Status updates, replies, comments, likes, everything can be done through links in the email (which take you to their site).

IFTTT seriously changed my online life and made it less online without being less.  Does that make sense?  It allows you to create “recipes” that you design yourself (or borrow from other users).  If you like to tweet everything you post on facebook, they will do it automatically for you.  If you want an email every time NetFlix adds new streaming movies, or a new LifeHaker DealHaker post is created, or to have your facebook status updates automatically tweeted, it is all done automatically.  Brilliant.  Do you want to know when the CDC reports a Zombie outbreak?  They got your back.  Oh, it stands for IF This Then That, since you are creating specific criteria that triggers the recipe to launch.
Thank World Wide Web

This Is Why You Were Friended or Unfriended

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November 17th is National Unfriend Day, but why put off tomorrow what you can do today? I feel no obligation to remain facebook friends with people from high school or old coworkers or people I used to think were cute or celebrities or anyone that has a very different political/religious/social view. It’s a social media, not an argument media or disrespect others opinions media. It probably would have been better if facebook would have used a different word than “friends,” because un-friending is taken so personally when it doesn’t need to be. I do not see the need to “celebrate the differences” or “agree to disagree.” There are reasons that people fall out of contact with people they knew through circumstances of proximity, it is just that the internet now makes us feel obligated to stay in contact. We used to have the choice to keep in touch with people we no longer see daily, I say we still do. I recently went through my friends list and made some deep cuts using a pretty simple criteria: you need to be smart, funny and/or entertaining. I have to like you. Here are my examples:

If we worked together ten years ago and barely socialized outside of work then and not at all now and you have not helped me get a job at whatever company you moved to and you are not smart, funny and/or entertaining? Bye.

If your politics are very different than mine and you routinely refer to people with views different than yours in derogatory terms and are not smart, funny and/or entertaining? Later.

If you use your religion as a weapon against people who do not believe in your exact flavor of spirituality and are not smart, funny and/or entertaining? See ya.

If you invite me to join Farmville (or whatever is the next Farmville). Tootle-Loo

If your posts are sad pathetic cries for attention. So long.

If you are not smart or funny. The least you could do was post embarrassing drunken photos of yourself. Peace out.

If we went to high school together and the most we have ever interacted was the Facebook friend request and you have not grown into someone that is smart, funny and/or entertaining? I gotta go.

But do not take it personally, it is not you, it’s me. Well, it is not just me, it is an internet-wide trend and chances are you are unfriending too.

My reasons are quite similar to a recent study results. According to Pew’s most recent study on social networking sites, most users don’t agree with their friends’ political postings. As the election approaches, it’s only going to get worse. Here’s why we’re unfriending one another these days:

• Because you post too often about political subjects (10 percent of users have blocked or hidden someone for this reason)

• Because you posted something you find so disagreeable it was offensive (9 percent)

• Because you argued with me about politics (8 percent — but doesn’t it take two to make an argument?)

• Because you posted something that would offend my friends (5 percent)

• Because I disagree with your political posts (4 percent)

Unfriending has become so rampant that the word was 2009’s word of the year in the Oxford Dictionary. Emotions run high around unfriending, too — especially now that there are apps that notify users when they’ve been dropped from someone else’s Facebook list. There have even been cases of people reacting violently in real life to a cyber unfriending.

Other studies about Facebook unfriending, such as a 2010 one conducted by the University of Colorado at Denver, have come to similar conclusions.

“Unfriending reflects the instrumentalization and commodifying of friendship on Facebook,” Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” told the New York Times. “Why unfriend someone at all? After all, in the real world, you don’t just ignore an obnoxious relative. The very act of unfriending acknowledges that the Facebook definition of friend is different from the traditional.”

Here is how to clean up your facebook news feed:

Hide a person or a type of story (ex: quizzes or games)
Hover over the top-right menu of a story, click the drop-down menu and choose what you’d like to hide:

  1. Hide story will remove the story you’re looking at
  2. Hide all by and Unsubscribe from will remove the story you’re looking at, as well as all future stories from a person, Page, group, event or app
  3. Report story or spam will remove the story you’re looking at and help keep your news feed clear of stories like it in the future

If you accidentally hide something you want to see, click the Undo link.

To unfriend someone:

  1. Go to that person’s profile (timeline)
  2. Hover over the Friends box at the top of their profile (timeline)
  3. Click Unfriend

Note: If you choose to unfriend someone, you will be removed from that person’s friends list as well. If you want to be friends with this person again, you’ll need to send a new friend request.

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How Facebook Makes You Think Life’s Not Fair

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I must admit, the main reason I like this article is because of the fat cat photo.  I like the idea of the cat cropping out all his fatness and even photoshopping off the extra huge cheeks.  It’s funny.

The article feels true to me, but also, it feels right.  I do limit my time on Facebook.  Not exactly because I feel everyone has a much more fabulous life than I do, but partly.  Partly also that no one wants to have a real discussion.  You post something that someone disagrees with and they attack you or you disagree with something someone has written and they take it as a threat.

I once made a point of replying to a post that someone made about the vandals on May Day, he called them “deadbeat retards living off of the government.”  I found it to be a lazy assumption about a group of people that were already getting too much attention when compared with the number of people who peacefully protested.  I don’t agree with the destruction they caused, but I also do not see any point of posts like that when there are plenty of actual facts that he could have used.  He told me that he wasn’t surprised that I was sticking up for them because “people that think like you do” always stick together.  All I was trying to do was to elevate his argument away from silly name-calling.  His cousin then decided to stick up for him by stating, “last time I checked, we were in America and entitled to our own opinions.”  I explained that I agreed, but she continued to attack.  I deleted all my comments and unfriended him.

Repeat a similar scenario about childhood cancer and another about gun control involving people that I used to know 20 years ago and reconnected over Facebook (but the most Facebook interaction we had was at the initial friend request), both resulting in me deleting all my comments and un-friending them.  I am exhausted.

I know we all can agree to disagree, but at the same time, we don’t have to agree to remain Facebook friends.  There are no requirements or etiquette that make you keep all your Facebook friends.  Think about it as real life:  you loose contact with people for any number of reasons, it just happens.  Now, you kind of have to make it happen, but it doesn’t mean you are a bad person, and even if you think it does make you a bad person, fuck it, pull the trigger and un-friend.  Unclog your Facebook feed of people that hold it hostage, stop diluting it with garbage.  They probably won’t even notice.

Call it the unwritten rule of Facebook: People don’t post pictures about the parts of their lives that suck. And while you sit in your boring, old apartment and flip through photos of your buddy’s trip to New Zealand, you may start to wonder why your life is so dull. Turns out you’re not the only one, finds a new study from Utah Valley University.

Facebook is all about managing other people’s impressions, the study explains. Past research has shown that Facebook users carefully cultivate profiles that highlight positive attributes and associations, while downplaying or excluding undesirable traits.

Duh, right? But here’s where it gets interesting: The Utah Valley team wondered how these exaggeratedly awesome profiles might impact self-perception among regular Facebook users. To find out, they recruited 425 undergraduates and asked each to complete a questionnaire detailing their use of the social networking site and their outlook on life.

Their findings: The more time a student spent on Facebook, the more likely he was to believe that his friends’ lived happier lives, and that life itself is unfair.

Those feelings increased among students who had the greatest number of Facebook “friends” that weren’t really personal acquaintances. (Example: That dude in your econ class who you’ve talked to exactly once.)

Why does this happen? Staring at everyone else’s happiest times on Facebook gives you the impression that those people are always having a blast, explains study author Grace Chou, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist at UVU. As a result, you subconsciously start to believe that everyone is living a cooler, more exciting life than you are—even though you’d probably realize that wasn’t true if you really thought about it. This effect is magnified when you don’t know your “friend” personally because your perception of his or her life is based exclusively on a (somewhat bogus) Facebook profile.

Now, don’t get us wrong. There are plenty of benefits to Facebook. Studies have shown the site can help facilitate civic and political participation, and it allows you to stay connected with real-life friends and family members. But too much time spent in the Facebook utopia can be a downer, especially if your “friends” are really just random acquaintances, Chou says.

The students in the study spent an average of about 5 hours each week on Facebook. Aim to stay at or below that level, and restrict your group of “friends” to real friends, and life may seem a little sweeter, Chou advises.

via How Facebook Makes You Think Life’s Not Fair | Men’s Health News.

Dos Equis Man Speaks For Me (On Fridays)

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Maybe it is because it is Friday and I run out of bubble gum pretty early (and everyone knows I come to the internet to kick ass and chew bubble gum) or maybe it is because everyone is extra stupid on Friday. I am not sure which. All I know is that for the most part, I have found it best to not look at Facebook on Fridays and if I do look at Facebook on Fridays, I should not comment on all the dumb shit everyone posts. If I do comment, it is pretty much guaranteed that I want to start a fight.

Here’s the deal, on Fridays, you are extra stupid and I know you’re stupid and you know I know you’re stupid. You just get annoyed when I point out how stupid you are on Fridays. It’s not your fault, it’s not mine, it is what it is.

Plus, everyone knows that all the good shit goes down on twitter.

I thought about the Dos Equis man about halfway through the day, thinking about how funny it would be to make it. Naturally, it is not an original thought, there is a freaking meme generator just for it. Make one yourself here: http://www.quickmeme.com/Dos-Equis-man/?upcoming

Here is mine (same as above): http://qkme.me/3osauh

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How to Suck at Facebook

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How to Suck at Facebook – The Oatmeal.

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