BAD READ: This is why I don't have a Facebook account

[1step]

Last edited Mon Dec 29, 2014, 10:01 PM - Edit history (1)

Eric Meyer, writing in Slate...

I didn’t go looking for grief on Christmas Eve, but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it. In this case, the designers and programmers are somewhere at Facebook.

I know they’re probably very proud of the work that went into the “Year in Review” app they designed and developed, and deservedly so—a lot of people have used it to share their highlights of 2014. I kept seeing them pop up in my feed, created by various friends, almost all of them with the default caption, “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.” Which was, by itself, a little bit unsettling, but I didn’t begrudge my friends who’d had a good year. It was just a weird bit of copy to see, over and over, when I felt so differently.

Still, it was easy enough to avoid making my own Year in Review, and so I did. After all, I knew what kind of year I’d had. But then, the day before Christmas, I went to Facebook and there, in my timeline, was what looked like a post or an ad, exhorting me to create a Year in Review of my own, complete with a preview of what that might look like.



Clip art partiers danced around a picture of my middle daughter, Rebecca, who is dead. Who died this year on her sixth birthday, less than 10 months after we first discovered she had aggressive brain cancer.

Full article http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/12/29/facebook_year_in_review_my_tragic_year_was_the_wrong_fodder_for_facebook.html

Doesn't this make you wanna punch Zuckerburg in the face? But we're really all to blame. We've sold our souls to mechanisms we thought would bring us closer together, when in fact, they've turned us into an oxymoronic society of hermits.

[greatlaurel]

1. Thanks for posting.

This was a very interesting article. I do think the author was way too nice to the Facebook people,though. That had to be devastating to see.

[1step]

3. WAY too nice!

I agree with you completely.

[appalachiablue]

2. I detest FB, never use it. Horrible story of corp. exploitation. A sick, decaying HERMIT SOCIETY.

[Old Codger]

4. Reinforcement

For me ass to why I am not on that piece of crap. What a waste of actual social intercourse.

[Skittles]

5. we are NOT all to blame

some of us NEVER fell for this garbage

my sympathy to this poor guy

[greatlaurel]

6. Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut addresses some of these issues.

Very good novel and a good read. My son got it for me for Christmas.

[47of74]

7. There are days I say replace the Z with an F

[alarimer]

8. This is what happens when companies are run by tech nerds.

They are completely unable to relate to other people or they simply don't get that people are not algorithms.

What is "cool" to one is heartless and unfeeling to another.

Facebook and Uber are the prime examples of tech nerds not getting it.