Does anyone these days even know what it means to actually communicate?

[vvvexation]

From Wired's article on the Facebook redesign (h/t to metahacker):

“With the current profile, you look at my wall, you look at my photos, you’re done — there’s nothing else to do,” says Chris Cox, Facebook’s VO of Product. He compares it to the first five minutes with a stranger, when you simply find out the basics about a person — where they work, where they went to school, who they know. Even the more extensive information that Facebook has added over the years only adds up to five more minutes of conversation, where you might learn what the person was been doing very recently.

[...]

Cox says that instead of that brief conversation you used to get by scanning the previous version of the profile, visiting the profile will be the equivalent of going to a bar to have a long overdue five-hour soul exchange. “It’s that conversation where you play the jukebox till it runs out, the bar closes, and you walk about and say, ‘Man, that was really deep,’” he says.

The profile will be “a visual scrapbook of your life,” says Cox. At his F8 keynote Zuckerberg goes farther, calling it “the story of your life.” Visitors come by to learn about who you are in detail — it will almost be like being left alone in someone’s apartment and being able to check out their bookshelves, CD’s, refrigerator and even their pedometer — but people will actually spend endless time on their own profiles, not only organizing them but eventually hanging out there to reminisce about the past.

Ohferchrissake. Am I alone in thinking that hearing what day-to-day shit someone's been up to for the past year instead of the past week does not make a conversation any fucking deeper? Or that checking out someone's bookshelves, though it may help one get a slightly better sense of the person, does not count as some kind of "soul exchange"?

Give people a platform to make posts that actually have content, and then maybe I'll be able to feel like I know them better after checking out their archives.

Okay, yeah, so people are mostly too busy for content these days, and it's easier for them to broadcast every little thing they do rather than take time to talk about the big things. Fine, I understand; sometimes you gotta make sacrifices, and sometimes you've got to settle for whatever way you can manage to keep in contact at all. But don't pretend it's not a sacrifice; don't pretend that a firehose of trivia is somehow just as interesting or informative as an actual conversation.

Comments

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

The benefit of a long overdue soul exchange is that the participants have a chance to edit. When I see a friend I've lost touch with, I talk about work and travel and love life and political movements. But what I say isn't just a concatenation of the in-the-moment comments I made as they were happening.

The focus of late for social media has been "what's going on right now?" but I haven't seen anything new that's good at talking about "what happened?" Maybe that's the "endless time on their own profiles" -- tweaking it so that your college years don't look like a flood of plastic red cups and pals who don't appear in your stream now.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I can almost imagine the same software that's keeping a record of everything you look at and listen to replacing that list after a certain amount of time with a summary of what you were mostly looking at and listening to, but I can't imagine it doing a much more sophisticated job than that of boiling down what you've been up to.

[labelleizzy.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[hot-turkey.livejournal.com]

Wow. It's like communication == stalking.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Or like stalking == communication.

[pielology.livejournal.com]

Facebook could be an adequate platform for genuine personal content, if I trusted their privacy controls. Buuuuut I don't - and nobody else does either. So it fills up with milquetoast bullshit.

[funcrunch.livejournal.com]

The Facebook F8 vision of the future - timeline and all - disturbed me deeply. It's made me want to share less, not more, online and spend more time connecting with people in meatspace.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

So, I actually like the idea of the facebook timeline. I like the idea of being able to look back over time and see trends - one of the things about facebook that has always annoyed me is that once something is a few days old I CAN NEVER FIND IT AGAIN! It would be nice to have visibility into more, both for myself and for my friends. Recently a high-school acquaintance made a status update about leaving her first home and marriage and I had missed the original update about her getting divorced and I had to painstakingly scroll back 3 months to find it (which I actually did on her twitter feed not facebook because facebook makes it so painful). And without that knowledge a bunch of her other comments in the interim had been confusing and contextless and suddenly it all made sense. It would have been nice to see some at a glance overview that would let me put the comments in context right away.

But to say that that's like making some deep meaningful connection is so much hyped up bullshit.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not objecting to the idea of keeping longer-lasting records, just to the idea that that alone makes everyone's interactions more meaningful.