Why are you so mad about Facebook and Twitter?

Reading the Relevant website today, I came across an article from Brett McCracken titled “The Death of Facebook,” in which McCracken blasts the recent chain-post “25 Random Things” that blazed Facebook in recent weeks. He believes that the utter lameness of the 25 things phenomenon will propel Facebook into cultural faux pas and irrelevance.

In other words, he thinks Facebook is about to go MySpace on us.

It’s really clear that the author is not a fan of social networking of this type. Not in the least. But I wonder if his description of how and why social networking sites are used really shines light on why the average person (or at least the average person of legal adulthood) uses such sites. 

Here’s the climax of the article:

I feel like I have false notions of so many people, just because I know them only or primarily through the Internet. It’s so much more interesting and enlightening to get to know someone in reality, without all that. I like being able to discover things about people by asking them, hearing from them, having mysteries and encountering little discoveries along the way. I like seeing the dissonance between someone’s facial expression and or body language and what they are saying. When we all have control over what we look like and how we define ourselves on the Internet, it removes that mystery. And it turns “friendship” into something that has less to do with knowing people deeply than just knowing whatever bits and pieces of them they want to reveal (which happens in real-world relationships too, but moreso on the Internet).  

Human beings are far, far more complex and wonderful than their status updates and “ingredient listing” profile pages. And it is far more rewarding and profound to get to know someone in an unsafe, slightly uncertain and awkward way than to rigorously research them and pretend to know them via all the accumulated Internet data on them.  

So let’s take a step back from “25 Things” and think about this. Do we really think that sending out mass notes with carefully selected tidbits about ourselves is making anyone more known? Who are we kidding? As a mindless diversion and exercise in classic facebook self-love, it’s fine. But as a commentary on the uses and practices of online social networking (which I think it pretty much is), “25 Things” is nothing if not a warning sign that the end is near. 

I think the author’s points are interesting (not to mention articulate, which I appreciate). But I generally disagree with his conclusions, and want to point out a few reasons why. (I’m not even going to get into the fact that Relevant thrives on the culture he’s bashing; it’s like Sports Illustrated running a piece about how sports are dull and and we should all be more interesting in knitting.)

1) All mediums of communication suffer from the shortcomings this article attributes to Twitter, Facebook, and the like. If anything, this validates Facebook and other forms of online social networking. Have you ever said anything super embarrassing over the phone? How many “sacred” face-to-face conversations do you make it through without saying something you regret?

If people look back on the “25 things” (which I didn’t participate in, by the way, so I’m not writing out of some deep wound or bias) and say to themselves, “That was so lame of me,” so what? Does that invalidate Facebook as a medium for communication? Or is it actually the other way around?

2.) The Internet is reality, as much as a face-to-face conversation is reality. If we’re going to have a big old philosophical conversation of reality and its ontology, I think we’ll find that poking someone on Facebook is “real” in that it happens. Is it significant? I don’t think it is. If it’s meaning we’re after, then let’s identify that. But people create reality that is not significant (think: reality television) all the time, and many of the face-to-face interactions we have are just as shallow. All of that to say I think people are enthralled with the idea that they can create reality (even if that reality is not significant to most of us).

3.) Social networking is probably used to maintain relationships far more often than it is used to create relationships. Most of the criticisms of Facebook and Twitter are knocks on their ability to help us get to know someone. (Which in itself is a questionable point because we carry such a strong facade on the phone or sitting across a table over coffee. I’m not deconstructing this to the point of saying it is impossible to truly know another person. I’m just saying that I don’t observe a lop-sided impact of insincerity and facade in one particular medium of communication.) 

Facade aside, I think there’s something to be said of shared experience as a relationship-builder. And it’s more difficult to share experiences online than in person, I think. My guess is that most of us don’t attempt to do that, however. There are already people in our life with whom we’ve built shared experience and story, and we use things like Facebook to maintain the relationships beyond and in addition to those shared experiences.

Which leads to my next point.

4.) We are scattered. In the past six years, I’ve lived in Cleveland, Boston, and Seattle while having short stints (but building very cool relationships) in Chicago and Portland. There are so many incredible people I’ve met in each of those stops, and I want to continue those relationships still. 

Psychologist Malcolm Gladwell says in his book The Tipping Point that human beings, on average, have the capacity to maintain between 12 and 13 close relationships. I think my personal capacity might even be below that average. At the same time, I absolutely love people I’ve met along my different stops. So while I don’t think it’d be healthy for my entire 12 to consist of people outside of Seattle (where I am now), I think it’d be weird if there weren’t 3 or 4 people on my list from places like Cleveland and Boston. I see integrity in that.

Not only do I want part of my 12 to reflect the other points along my pilgrimage, but I would like to think that people outside my 12 aren’t dead to me. I would like to think that I could maintain relationships with the occasional Facebook “How are you?” or by reading up on what my friend is up to these days.

It’s a much-improved version of the Christmas card relationships of our parents’ generation. 

I use examples from my own story, but I believe that most people are in a similar position to my own. If anything, I think people (especially folks who are 10-15 years older than me) are more traveled and connected than I am. Globalization is not simply an economic term; it’s something that happens to us as people more and more with each passing year.

I don’t want to be punished relationally for having relocated a few times. Nor do I want to stick it to my friends who’ve done the same. Why should globalization cause us to fracture friendships and familial relationships? It makes no sense.

Is the “25 random things” phenomenon going to cause Facebook to shed it’s hip factor? I doubt it. But even if that did happen, there would come a new social networking site. Because millions of people are looking to utilize such sites to preserve connections around the world.

How ready are we to dismiss that as shallow?

Even when a networking site becomes lame and goes by the wayside, our maintained friendships tend to shift over to the next “in” site (how many of us have Facebook friends today that we’ve preserved from MySpace and Friendster days?). I don’t think we’re necessarily shallow. I think we’re learning how to navigate relationally through increasing globalization.

Because friends are friends, and we have them all over the place.

Journalism bias and subscription cancellations

Good article from Michael Malone at abcnews.com about the fall of journalism as it relates to this presidential election. It’s true to say that all journalism is slant journalism, but there is an ethical standard among journalists that they will do everything in their power to minimize the impact of their own opinion and bias. 

This week the decline of the newspaper industry has been a headline story. Long-standing publications are having to lay off employees, while other papers are rapidly declining their print frequency. Certainly with the continuous transition into the Electronic Age more and more newspaper subscriptions would be giving way to internet news anyway. But another factor for people moving away from a subscription to one or two print publications is the need for multiplicity of sources. Because no publication is telling the whole story, it takes 16 media outlets’ reports before the public can feel like they really know what’s going on.

What’s dangerous is when all 16 outlets are saying the same thing, yet it’s still a far cry from the full story, when a multiplicity of sources doesn’t dilute bias, but rather strengthens it.

Enough from me. Read what Malone has to say.

Dunkin’ and S-bux

So the big coffee news of the week is that Dunkin’ Donuts beat Starbucks in a national taste test. That’s all well and good, but I’d like to make two points:

1. This was a competition of standard house blend drip coffee (actually DD put their current house blend up against Starbucks’ old house blend, not the new Pike’s Place), and not any espresso bar beverages. I’m not in love with Starbucks’ drip, but the disparity between their espresso beverages and the stuff that DD is putting out is enormous. Clearly that’s where Starbucks has their edge.

2. Had this been a “digest test” instead of a “taste test,” maybe we would have different results on our hands. Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee – drip or espresso, it doesn’t matter – doesn’t sit very well. Maybe it serves as an adequate quick-fix if you need caffeine and nothing better is around, but give it a couple hours and there will be consequences.

 

 

Sirens, cops, floor toms, and snares

Found this in the RELEVANT News Slices:

If I ever get arrested, I’m absolutely positive that I want it to be for this.

Stat-crunching guru nails politics and baseball

Nate Silver is a nerd. The 30-year-old Chicagoan is a number-crunching stat jockey. And he’s becoming a household name.

Silver is an employee of Baseball Prospectus, an organization that works to rightly interpret baseball stats. Baseball Prospectus is regarded as a near-flawless authority in the sports world, and Silver is no small part of that success. How good is Silver at his job? He created PECOTA, an algorithm for determining a player’s success by comparing him to past players in similar career, style, and team settings.

Does PECOTA work? You betcha. Silver used PECOTA to predict, before the beginning of the baseball season, that the Tampa Bay Rays would win 90 games this year. Consider for a minute how absurd of a prediction that was in April. The Rays had never won 70 games in their franchise history. But Silver saw that these players, based on historical precedent, were supposed to succeed this year.

He made the bold prediction. Tampa Bay went out and won 97 games.

While baseball is his day job, Silver has been rocking a bit of a political side-project. He created FiveThirtyEight, a site on which Silver tracks and interprets national polls in order to predict elections. After some of his underdog predictions for the Democratic primaries came to fruition, Silver – who was writing under the alias “Poblano” – found his site rising from 800 visits a day up to 600,000. It wasn’t until May that Silver revealed his identity – and much to the shock of baseball junkies everywhere.

FiveThirtyEight continues to gain notoriety as a reliable political resource. Silver’s success has gained him interviews with everyone from MSNBC to ESPN. A recent New York Magazine piece (great journalism in this article, by the way) about Silver’s rise from a math guy who loves the national pastime to political informant.

If anyone wants to doubt Silver’s methods, that’s fine. But – look now – the Tampa Bay Rays are in the World Series.

And I play one on TV

Talk about taking your role seriously. An actor who is part of a recent blockbuster movie released this week in Britain on the Naples Mafia known as Camorra was arrested over the weekend for actually being part of Camorra.

The irony! 

My guess is that he really nailed the role. Can you imagine, during the making of the film, the director giving this guy a whole bunch of critique on his role. He just rolls his eyes and plays along. Awesome.

“Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?”

Look at it this way: if you get arrested in Atlanta, at least the person reading you your rights knows how you feel.

BYOS

For the second straight year, my craving for maple lattes, in combination with the failure of most coffeehouses to carry maple syrup, has led me to purchase a big ol’ bottle of maple syrup and bring it with me when I go for coffee in the mornings.

I go through the line, buy my drink, and then scurry out to the car to “spike” my drink with autumnal bliss, which I’ve been keeping in a cup-holder in the car. If anyone is watching me from the window, this has to look ornery if not suspicious. 

I mention this because some of you work in coffeehouses. Some of you own coffeehouses. If nothing else, you know a guy who works in a coffeehouse. Consider maple. Think about bringing it into your stock of syrups – at least from September through November. Help to build a world where maple-loving people like me don’t have to stoop to BYOS.

Damien Jurado’s new listens

I’m posting these just because I so enjoy Damien Jurado’s music, and the new songs are right in line with the good work he’s been doing for some time now.

If you’re someone who has listened to Jurado for awhile, then this first track might bring you back to the days of I Break Chairs. The guitar tone in this one is great – a real warm crunch on the chorus. “Go First” (there’s no video to it, just the album cover):

This other video is of “Last Rights,” and it was taken at a show Jurado played last month in Portland.

Children’s sing-along indie?

Just thought this was interesting, so I’m linking you there – an article on the RELEVANT site by Dylan Peterson which covers the motivation behind indie-esque artists like Feist, Kimya Dawson (Moldy Peaches), and Matt Pryor (The Get-Up Kids) creating children’s songs. It’s not something I could see myself doing, at least in terms of going through the full recording process on it, which is part of why the article interests me.