Facebook Groups
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Media, Rant, Web, opinion
I’ve never been too much of a fan of social network sites but neither do I have any particular objection to them; that said I am rather fond of twitter. Facebook is the arguably the largest social network site online at the current time, and I myself am a member. The main reason for this membership is that Facebook does seem to be the easiest way to contact real-world friends online; e-mail for personal communication appears to be all but dead. People use Facebook for all sorts of reasons, mine is basically a communication tool for people I actually know, and its also in someways a bit of a blog.
Anyway, the one thing that has always annoyed me with Facebook is the prevalence of the Facebook group. These groups allow people that are not “friends” with each other on the site the ability to communicate with each other in a mini-forum based on a shared topic of interest. These groups generally to fall in two categories: Banal Statements or Extreme Views. The Banal, for example: “Can this sausage roll get more fans than Cheryl Cole”, can get tiresome but are bearable, and then their are extreme groups such as “Bring back the hangman for acts of terrorism, treason, murder, paedophilia” and “Lock Jon Venables up for Life and Throw Away the Key”. The posts on the pages are just are no more charming than the titles themselves, for example one person wrote on the latter group:
“kill the bastard very slowly so he can feel the pain that little boy felt when he didnt give a fuck what he and his mate was doing to poor james, torchure the bastards and then kill them slowly causing them every bit of pain possible like they caused james let the public know the new names, see how long they last on the streets rip james they will get what they derserve evenually”
The most shocking thing about Facebook is not that these groups exist, but its finding out how many of your friends hold these sort of views and are actively trying to recruit others to join. I’m of course not saying that people shouldn’t be able to have a debate on such topics as capital punishment but the prevalence of extreme views on Facebook is startling; and this isn’t something that is a new phenomenon to Facebook, I remember discussing it a few years ago with my sixth-form sociology teacher.
Last week I read a opinion piece in the Guardian making this sort of point and it was this prompted me to write this little rambling piece, but its certainly worth mentioning. I recommend you have a little look at the article; because from what I can see, on the whole, itsn’t too face from the truth “Facebook groups are the new lynch mobs: These reactionary campaigners confuse the concept of ‘justice’ with ‘vigilante vengeance’”
Tags: Banal, blog, Cheryl Cole, Daily Mail, Extreme, Facebook, Groups, Jon Venables, opinion, Social networks, Twitter
Distractions = Creative Productivity?
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under News, Technology, opinion
For me, this Monday didn’t turn out to be the productive day I wanted it to be, due to various electronic distractions, but despite this I don’t believe that social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, amongst other various Internet delights, are in fact leading us to be less productive.
On Sky News last Sunday, they reported that a study from the University of Northampton suggests that people are becoming addicted to there gadgets.
The scenarios they give are worryingly familiar.
Interrupted from our primary task by a pop-up alerting us to an email, we stop what we are doing to read the email.
That then directs us elsewhere, perhaps to another link on the internet.
We may then check other emails stacked up behind the new one. A quick look on Facebook, Twitter or something else, and it may be half an hour before we’re back to that primary task.
“You can not any more do effectively the task you were originally doing, even if it was routine,” Professor Kakabadse said.
“You will suddenly feel low energy, you become clumsy and you have a spatial disorder. You become exhausted,” she said. (Sky News)
This sort of reporting regarding technology hardly new, neigh it is expected, take for example the scares around televisions. In relation to this story, which is nothing special; it seems to have only got coverage due to the PR department at the University of Northampton, I would suggest that you can find addiction in almost anything from cheese to stamp collecting from computer gaming to knitting.
It is of my opinion, and partly that of Russel M Davies from Wired magazine UK, that distraction may infact aid productivity. We were not designed to work solely on one task, as Davies points out, “we’re easily distracted creatures, evolved to be continually scanning for new stimuli…” I personally find that when doing creative work. i.e. not reading, it is much easier to do it with the occasional look at YouTube, the occasional bit of tweeting on twitter and the occasional stumble on stumble-upon. This personal affirmation seems to be proved plausible by a study pointed out by Davies who states that:
A study from the universities of Harvard and Toronto suggests that people with reduced latent inhibition are more likely to have original thoughts than the rest of us. Latent inhibition is “the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant”. I think this means that imaginative people are worse at screening out the world than you and me. Or better at being distracted. So maybe we mortals can increase our originality by deliberately and purposefully using distracting and unfocused tools. (Wired Magazine UK)
I must now end this blog post and get some work done, well, I’m going to have a quick look at facebook first, naturally.
Tags: Evolution, Facebook, Internet, News, Productivity, Reporting, Social networks, Study, Stumble Upon, Technology, Twitter, University, Web 2.0, work, youtube
I Left Myspace for Facebook… That makes me a Racist!
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under News, Web
Well, looks like I might be a racist. I quit Myspace recently for Facebook, and in a recent keynote speech social researcher Danah Boyd stated that “…digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight” My reasons for leaving were that Myspace is a shoddy site overloaded with adverts, and owned by Murdoch. In fact, despite me using Facebook, Twitter and other such services I’m not a big fan of social networks surprisingly. Without going into my all my reasons for using them, the purpose of Myspace/Facebook specifically, for me, was and is solely as communication tools as it seems that e-mail is “so 20th century”
Abandon your MySpace account for Facebook? You might just be a racist.
At a keynote speech during New York’s Democracy forum at Lincoln Center, Danah Boyd spoke of the racial disparity and possible reasons for mass abandonment of MySpace for the “more cultured” and “less cheesy” social networking site Facebook. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, stated:
“We might as well face an uncomfortable reality … what happened was modern day ‘white flight’.”
Boyd also observed that:
“The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us. It should scare the hell out of us.”
Referring to MySpace as the “ghetto of the digital landscape,” Boyd indicated that MySpace users are more likely to be “brown or black” and espouse a different set of ideals in conflict with those espoused by the teens she surveyed over four years. She said that patterns in migration across social networking sites echoed those of a white exodus from cities in the past. Boyd also said that teens who use Facebook are more likely to condescend their MySpace-favoring peers.
“Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell youMySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious… like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks and jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop. And Macs are more cultured than PCs.”
My first reaction to such a story is to scoff at it, and rightly so I think, that said, I really would like to look at the research behind it.
Tags: Facebook, Myspace, Racism, Racist, Social networks, Study
Redundant Data.
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Book, University, opinion
Earlier this week I had a Digital Media lecture about Social Networking sites, and there was a breif discussion about the differences between Myspace and Facebook. After the lecture I started thinking about my web habits and have decided to delete all the accounts that I no longer use (That is if i can even remember them at all)
One of the arguments raised in the class was that the proliferation of social networking sites, and in my opinion websites that require any personal data to be used effectively, are simply conditioning us to be more open to a surveillance orwellian-esq society. I can’t help but agree somewhat with this, it’s now just accepted that if we want to view a web-page we are going to have to provide personal data and make an account, (In fact this reminds me of The Gift by the sociologist Marcel Mauss) There was of course a time when this was in fact a rarity.
I was always of the opinion that I’d might as-well keep my online accounts open (such as myspace) just in case I might use them again, but in all honestly I most probably wont. I’d rather remove my data and only have it in places that I regularly use so I can try and keep more effective control of it, this ultimately is futile, but nevertheless knowing where data on me has been obtained in itself is useful.
I’ve so far successfully applied to have my myspace account deleted, it seems there is a 48 hour cooling off period before it is removed, I’m half expecting a torrent of e-mails from them trying to stop me from deleting it, in fact during the process of applying it kept saying things like “why don’t you add more friends?”, which I actually found quite insulting!
I’m going to, over the next few days, start deleting more accounts and updating information on others, hopefully it wont distract me too much from doing some much needed reading. I finish this post on a delightful image i found using a social network I do not intend to delete, stumbleupon.com
Note: I will make the image background transparent later, cannot be bothered to fire up photoshop at the moment.
Tags: Data, Digital, Facebook, Internet, Media, Myspace, Sociology
