What can be done about your Facebook friends who die? According to an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.com, Facebook is coming up with some solutions centered on “memorial pages.” Williams also gives this advice:
Be careful what profile pic you post or what your friends write on your wall — it might be your last enduring image.
Should parents stalk their kids on Facebook? The Onion reports:
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids
This article in Time Magazine points out that finding your former high school class mates has never been easier, thanks to Facebook, alumni sites and other social sites.
There’s another angle to the story, however. When you go online, you can figure out who’s successful and who fell through the cracks. With a mere click, you can find out who has started looking old, who’s still hot and who’s still married to whom. You can figure out where you stand in your high school pecking order without attending the high school reunion. In other words, you can figure out many of those things that motivate many people to attend reunions. For that reason, some have pointed at social sites as the reason many classes are skipping their reunions entirely.
I’ve previously written about a fascinating marshmallow experiment here and here.
To set the stage, keep in mind that marshmallows are the equivalent of crack cocaine for young children. In the experiment, numerous four-year olds were each left alone with a marshmallow and told that they could eat it if they wanted. They were also told that if they could wait until the experimenter returned (which would happen 15 minutes later), they could have two marshmallows.
Only about 30% of the children had the discipline to wait for the experimenter to return. When the psychologists followed up on these children fourteen years later, they found some startling things. Those four-year-olds who exerted the willpower to wait for two marshmallows scored an average of more than 200 points higher on the SAT than those who couldn’t wait. Those who could wait also show themselves to be more cooperative, more able to work under pressure and more self-reliant. In sum, they were dramatically more able to achieve their goals than those who couldn’t wait.
Which leads me to this thought: Are Internet social sites the cyber-equivalent of marshmallow dispensers? Since reading of the marshmallow experiment, I have repeatedly thought of inability of many people to resist spending hours on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I also think of those who burn long hours on MySpace and those who are non-stop texters. Perhaps Internet news junkies belong in the same category.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but there are numerous folks who aren’t getting nearly enough important things done in their lives (things THEY consider to be important) who are spending immense numbers of hours chatting and gossiping. I personally know some of these people. If these were retired people without any daily obligations, it would be one thing. Many of them, however, are blowing countless chances to make significant progress on goals that they themselves have set.
I remember the good old days, when I received a dozen or so emails every day at the office, thereby obviating the need to send and receive paper letters on those matters. Then something unproductive happened. As I started getting more and more emails, I found that they were becoming more fragmented, like stretched-out conversations, and more lost in a sea of emails that tried to sell me something or tried to make sure that I was constantly updated as to nothing very important.
Keeping up with email, then, has become both an incredible tool and a huge time drain. I think of that every day as I read and create 100 emails, many of which require detailed responses. Email, which was once a way to avoid sending and receiving paper letters, is now taking up several hours of every day. Why don’t I turn it off and get a lot more done? Because, every day, I end up decided that I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath-water. I love-hate the way email barely often enough distracts my attention to something that barely often enough requires my attention.
Sam Anderson explores our new attention-divided culture in a New York Magazine article titled, “In Defense of Distraction”:
This is troubling news, obviously, for a culture of BlackBerrys and news crawls and Firefox tabs—tools that, critics argue, force us all into a kind of elective ADHD. The tech theorist Linda Stone famously coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe our newly frazzled state of mind. American office workers don’t stick with any single task for more than a few minutes at a time; if left uninterrupted, they will most likely interrupt themselves. Since every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend nearly a third of our day recovering from them. We keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds.
This cartoon is being published at DI with the express permission of Dave Coverly.
Over the past week, on two separate occasions, middle-aged adults spontaneously blurted out to me that they had recently become Facebook “addicts.” Today, I stumbled across this delightful essay by Tara Styles, who has thought deeply about her own recent Facebook addiction. Styles’ writing style is engaging and you’ll enjoy her many observations about Facebook.
I am apparently immune to Facebook, given that I am already obsessed with writing for a blog. But Facebook is apparently catching fire, based on the rapidly growing number of times I hear it mentioned on the streets. Sometimes, it makes you wonder whether the people mentioning Facebook so often would rather be at their keyboards than talking with you in person.
From what I’ve seen and heard, Facebook is being used as both a tool to rekindle real friendships but also as a means to concoct the illusion that you have real friends (when you actually don’t). I’m not a critic of Facebook per se. As I see it, Facebook is merely a tool and, like so many other tools (knives, alcohol or religion, for example), it can be used or abused. But perhaps Facebook is more addictive than some other tools. Certainly, as a communications tool, it seems to be more addictive to most people than a piece of paper and a pen.
Facebook apparently used its no-pornography policy to justify removing a photo from a woman’s page - of her breastfeeding her infant daughter. She crossed the line, according to the Facebook spokesperson, for allowing the tiniest peek of her areola to show next to the baby’s mouth.
According to the spokesperson, they don’t go trolling through people’s photos looking [...]
