What We Do

Our best brains today should be solving problems in water, energy - both consumption and generation, efficient transportation solutions, food production and preservation, and managing climate change.

 

Instead, Facebook and Apple are our most valued brands, and thousands of the best minds are caught up in keeping us distracted. Through more "consumer entertainment" and essentially - timepass. Through mobile apps - over 50% of which are games. Through more and more inane and shallow conversation on flakier and flakier "networks". Amidst all this is the messaging that drives the "monetization" of all this distraction, and its one big game we're all playing.

 

Aldous Huxley was right in the Brave New World where "happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma." Our capacity to amuse and distract ourselves almost feeds upon itself now - with no end to its growth in sight.

 

We define ourselves through the gadgets that we possess and worship, and breathe through their updates and upgrades. We live in a constructed reality that drifts away further from the real planet, real people, real food, real problems around us. Obviously, we're not worried about, or driven enough to be solving them.

 

We can probably do better. Will we?

What I need on Facebook

Facebook is up to 400 million users. Thats almost 6.7% of the world population! Awesome. 

What does it mean to me ? 

On the plus side, I've "reconnected" with a whole lot of folks from my past life. school, college, hometown - they're all in there. I've also connected with a lot many new connections that I forge through cycling, or other activity I participate in these days.

Amongst these, I get to know on an ongoing basis who's working in what part of the world, and who's had kids, and partied last night, and even the political, social views of many of these folks. Sometimes, I feel like an inadvertent voyeur!

Too broad a social landscape ? Too much info ? Some of these are context specific contacts, and while I do share some interests with them, I do not need to know every little detail in their lives, their friendships, their views on everything! In fact, with many there's little beyond the "Add as friend", and apart from having access to their inboxes, or walls, etc, there's little else by way of friendship or any sort of relationship. The context's too weak, and too distant, and its a farce, really. 

I certainly am interested in a smaller, tighter circle of friends, and have been actively thinking I need to keep my 'active social circle' much smaller, and more meaningful. Sure, I do interact with the larger set of people on specific interests, and it would be great to tap into their collective knowledge and wisdom on a need-basis - but without the full duplex intrusiveness of every little update from each others lives, social circles, etc. I might be old fashioned, but Facebook is not how my social life - at least the meaningful part of it - really operates. This was NOT that much of a problem when the number of connections was smaller, but the amount of fluff has grown manifold since. And turning a request down has since become some sort of a social faux pas.

There's opportunity for a different layer atop Facebook - which is reducing to some sort of a storage and archival medium for one's entire social graph - personal, hobby-derived, official, formal, etc as well as the activity on it - that helps consume the data from this store in a more meaningful, natural way. Either Facebook could add features to enable this (they were kinda forced to handle the Twitter deluge using the "Live Feed" vs "News Feed" split)  or a 3rd party app/site will spring up sooner or later to do this. The noise in there is getting a little too much, and I've been wondering if it really matters whether I'm "on Facebook" or not. 

Those who really need to find me or talk to me, will, anyhow. The rest is often just noise/PR.

Posted via web from workFront