Six years after getting in on the ground floor of Facebook (well, the first or second floors, at least - December '06), I've come to adamantly despise the site. I signed up for a private communication tool between me and my college friends; the Facebook of today is an all-inclusive public communication tool, chat client, games hub, search engine, universal commenting system, like-harvesting, check-in, and Q&A site that fights against me to make as much of my content as public as possible in order to sell to advertisers.
With each passing year comes an increasing burden upon us to control our digital identity. The data I share on my profile dictates that I keep my privacy at a high level, and that makes it a poor choice to broadcast to the world. At the same time, there are aspects of Facebook which I like, but don't like the manner in which they implement, or have found sites around the Web that do a better job of it. My favorite TV Shows and movies are a good example - on an older version of Facebook, I listed Dexter as a favorite show of mine and was done with it. A couple of upgrades ago, they forced me to convert it into a Like, so now I have "useful" promotional information about the show shoved into my News Feed with no way to completely remove it. Similarly, my "favorite movies" section included the phrase "the films of Mel Brooks," which got converted into a gibberish Like link that went nowhere, and which I could only fix by removing entirely. Now it looks like I don't like any shows and movies, when the exact opposite is true.
My news feed is a collection of people who think other people care about every minute slight that occurs against them in their daily lives; a place for recent or soon-to-be mothers to complain about the inconveniences of pregnancy or to document how raising their ugly kids has completely put an end to them doing anything interesting with their lives; a trap for stupid people to display to the world their stupidness by posting status updates riddled with misspellings, the latest plea for those suffering from the Whogivesashit disease, or a request to be their friend in whatever time-killing game is currently distracting them from contributing to society.
As each incremental update has been met with more consternation by Yours Truly, I've made a bigger push to move as much content as I can outside of Facebook and into more powerful and more segregated platforms. Thanks to Google Profiles and a slew of other services, I think I've exceeded what Facebook has to offer in many respects, but there are still some aspects that work best within the service. Photo tagging, for example. The all-inclusiveness of the News Feed can't really be found anywhere else, either, which affects engagement, and it's really one of the only reasons why I don't just shut down my account altogether. Despite the participation of seemingly the entire world, Facebook isn't too big to fail, and once more people reach the point at which they are sick of the site telling them how to be social, maybe we'll realize that for social to be effective, it needs to be on the open web. In the meantime, I'll still have some sort of presence on The Social Network, though it will continue to dwindle, so you can reach me there, doing a search for "Brad Seehawer" on Google, or by going to www.bradseehawer.com .
With each passing year comes an increasing burden upon us to control our digital identity. The data I share on my profile dictates that I keep my privacy at a high level, and that makes it a poor choice to broadcast to the world. At the same time, there are aspects of Facebook which I like, but don't like the manner in which they implement, or have found sites around the Web that do a better job of it. My favorite TV Shows and movies are a good example - on an older version of Facebook, I listed Dexter as a favorite show of mine and was done with it. A couple of upgrades ago, they forced me to convert it into a Like, so now I have "useful" promotional information about the show shoved into my News Feed with no way to completely remove it. Similarly, my "favorite movies" section included the phrase "the films of Mel Brooks," which got converted into a gibberish Like link that went nowhere, and which I could only fix by removing entirely. Now it looks like I don't like any shows and movies, when the exact opposite is true.
My news feed is a collection of people who think other people care about every minute slight that occurs against them in their daily lives; a place for recent or soon-to-be mothers to complain about the inconveniences of pregnancy or to document how raising their ugly kids has completely put an end to them doing anything interesting with their lives; a trap for stupid people to display to the world their stupidness by posting status updates riddled with misspellings, the latest plea for those suffering from the Whogivesashit disease, or a request to be their friend in whatever time-killing game is currently distracting them from contributing to society.
As each incremental update has been met with more consternation by Yours Truly, I've made a bigger push to move as much content as I can outside of Facebook and into more powerful and more segregated platforms. Thanks to Google Profiles and a slew of other services, I think I've exceeded what Facebook has to offer in many respects, but there are still some aspects that work best within the service. Photo tagging, for example. The all-inclusiveness of the News Feed can't really be found anywhere else, either, which affects engagement, and it's really one of the only reasons why I don't just shut down my account altogether. Despite the participation of seemingly the entire world, Facebook isn't too big to fail, and once more people reach the point at which they are sick of the site telling them how to be social, maybe we'll realize that for social to be effective, it needs to be on the open web. In the meantime, I'll still have some sort of presence on The Social Network, though it will continue to dwindle, so you can reach me there, doing a search for "Brad Seehawer" on Google, or by going to www.bradseehawer.com .
